Ana Cristea Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition featuring two young artists living and working in Croatia, painter Marin Majic and video/multimedia artist Goran Škofic. Majic and Škofic share an interest in employing processes that rely upon today’s digital possibilities in order to create work that remains firmly grounded in a pre-digital context.

Though he now resides in Croatia, Marin Majic (b. 1979) was born and spent formative childhood years in Germany. His canvases are characterized by unexpected combinations and juxtapositions—in Wald, a small sculpture of an elk (resting on a braided rug) sits at the convergence of several stone paths within a lush, almost jungle-like garden. Majic uses digital-collaging to create sketches that place no limits on reality, but these mock-ups are only the starting point for his meticulous oil paintings. The deliberate thinness of his paint application, which allows the grain of the canvas to show through, subtly undermines the illusion created by Majic’s painted images and even suggests (but does not mimic) the pixilation of a blown-up digital image. Majic studied at Academy of Visual Arts, Zagreb and has exhibited throughout Croatia, in Berlin, and in the United States. This is his first gallery exhibition in the U.S.

Goran Škofic (b. 1979) works primarily with video art, photography and the new media, and, like Majic, investigates the potential of the ‘composite’ image. This exhibition presents two recent video pieces, Corpus and White; in each, the artist uses his own body as an instrument. While advanced digital manipulation is integral to his work, Škofic’s videos often reference the physical comedy of silent film as well as the fascination with repetition and the body in motion which characterized early cinematic experiments and even chronophotography. His work is notable both for its sense of humor and for its exploration of the overlap between the ordinary and the absurd. Last year, Škofic was the recipient of the Radoslav Putar Award for a Croatian artist under thirty-five and was chosen to represent Croatia at the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean. In 2010, he was awarded a residency at ISCP in New York. This is his first U.S. gallery exhibition.