The team at BLOK would like to express their deepest thanks to the Artist for allowing us to publish their work. All images courtesy of the Artist and Gregor Podnar gallery, Vienna.
BODYSHOP, Vienna, 2023
The paper is my skin, filled with muscles, bones and organs folded on top of each other in a supposedly logical order that has been given to me. In the Bodyshop series, colored pencils, scalpel and scissors are my tools to cut deep under the skin and understand anatomy more precisely. By dissecting, I autopsy my organs piece by piece, chaos is created. This is my material for a new game, the workshop of my body.
My body is a space. Here I negotiate the dissolution of boundaries, norms and binary of a body that wants to live by its own rules. In the process I cut the tissue and dissect myself to many unique parts. With deep cuts, I simultaneously detach the bond to my earlier self. This separation is existentially important to me, it relieves me of dependencies and urges. When I cut, I feel less pain, more it is a fascination of complex connections in my physical body and the possibility to stretch and modify them. My body floats and I feel a new kind of love for myself. Drawn intestines, spine or heart do not ignore their functions, but the hierarchical order. I place them next to each other on a metaphysical level and intertwine them anew. This composition becomes a new manual of diversity in which completely fluid bodies live and love.
HERBARIUM, Vienna, 2017-2023
INSIDE OUT – BROKEN DRAWINGS, Vienna, 2022
In a second part of my project I play with human and animal body parts that I considered not drawn well enough. These drawings have become an archive in the storage drawers, I call them “drawings with potential”. I cut parts of different drawings and glue them together into new compositions. The result is a new body shape that has emerged with completely unexpected dimensions, proportions and anatomical principles. The wooden sticks hold my paper objects and give them functionality and movement. Here I claim that a body is not static. On the contrary, it is in constant changeable motion without spatial and temporal definition.
I was born in former Czechoslovakia, today I live and work in Vienna as a freelance artist. I graduated (B.A.) from the Academy for Applied Arts in Bratislava in 2010 (SK) and received my Diploma (Mag.art.) from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2015 (AT).
I describe the content of my work as a critical confrontation with identity issues, especially confrontations of different groups, excluded from society. The starting point of my work deals with new experimental forms of drawing as resistance to exclusion and racism. I belong to the Roma ethnic group, but don’t define myself as a Roma artist. My work shows a much more constant interest in multiple questions of diverse and convertible identity, the queer body and its existence, possessed in different physical and mental bodies, in relation to normative society and its boundaries.
My medium of choice is conceptual drawing and its experimental implementation, the de-construction of forms and the quest to push all possible limits. My works are mostly autobiographical, imagined as a constant and obsessive searching for exact proportion and symmetry.
Robert Gabris
Imprint
| Artist | Robert Gabris |
| Website | robertgabris.com/ |
| Index | Robert Gabris |