Nadezda Prvulovic.

ART ET INDUSTRIE

Entitled "United," this engaging exhibition comprised six monumental gouaches on paper on canvas selected from Nadezda Prvulovic's series of paintings depicting steel blast furnaces. The series, which dates from the early '80s, was inspired by a glimpse of the abandoned melting cauldrons that dot the outskirts of the French industrial town of Thionville which the artist once passed through. In 1984, when Yugoslavian-born Prvulovic settled in the United States, the specific locations depicted in the first paintings in this series became more generic evocations of the machine age. Recalling Bernd and Hilla Becher's documentary views of industrial landscapes, Prvulovic's most recent additions to this body of work-in-progress, which are painted from photographs found in trade magazines and other publications, are predominantly monochromatic or black and white, the images deliberately flattened.

Attracted to blast furnaces as records of a previous age as well as for their formal properties, Prvulovic mixes quite a bit of magic into her realism. For instance, in Kazan, 1997, a metal-melting cauldron captured from an awkwardly low viewpoint erupts with blue smoke that permeates the strangely hallucinatory space around it, obliterating distinctions between inside and outside. As if to lend the exhibition some conceptual unity, the intensity of blue paint seemed to increase from one work to the next, culminating in a close-up of a blast furnace called United Blue, 1996 (an oblique reference to Yves Klein?). In this seductive work, the theatricality that characterizes much of Prvulovic's painting reached its zenith: the industrial backdrop became a mysterious stage set where a small, robotlike construction seemed a wry allusion to Russian Constructivism and its utopian belief in the power of technology to effect social change. By contrast, formal concerns dominated the monumental Cyprus Battery, 1996, in which a fragment of a cart used to carry materials from one end of the assembly line to the other is repeated four times and inscribed with dates of only personal significance. The most striking work in the show was Glowing Green, 1997, a gigantic image of a steel-mill interior illuminated by a blazing orange flame. The space, much like that in Prvulovic's other paintings, is a ghostly terrain devoid of human presence.

The titles of two works included the word "Kazan," the name of Russia's major industrial city on the Volga river. Infamous for its heavily polluting metal industry, Kazan was also the site of Lenin's early revolutionary activities and can be said to epitomize the forced modernization of the Soviet Union under Stalin. Yet Prvulovic seems decidedly averse to engaging in specific sociopolitical critiques; when prodded she claims these titles were meant to evoke nothing more than the prosaic meaning of the word "Kazan": "pot" in Serbo-Croatian - a rather odd reference given the absence of allusions to domesticity in her work.

By distancing her works from the broader implications of their subjects, even deliberately confusing the viewer about her position vis-a-vis technology, Prvulovic might have communicated a need to express the universal anguish caused by massive industrialization. Instead, she transforms sinister industrial sites into romanticized visions that resist a political reading. Given our increased awareness of the implications of rapid technological developments, it is difficult not to find this disturbing. Formally, however, Prvulovic's works move us with their distinctive painterly sensibility.

- Marek Bartelik