(Upstairs gallery)

Extended view: Wednesday, March 2, 6–8 pm, and Friday, March 4, 6–8 pm

Croatian artist David Maljkovic’s latest works, Recalling Frames, are photomontages that interweave still images from Orson Welles’ film The Trial, shot in Zagreb in 1962, with the artist’s own contemporary photographs of the filming locations. Welles’ haunting exploration of the terror of faceless bureaucracy was set against the city’s Cold War-era Modernist buildings, to which Maljkovic returned to carefully photograph the sites from the same dramatic angles shown in the film. Spliced together from black-and-white negative prints, the resulting unique prints conflate five decades of aesthetic and ideological change.

In some of Maljkovic’s works, sections of austere concrete architecture are seamlessly connected across the disparate photographs, with characters from Welles’ film inhabiting a present urban environment that has gone unchanged in the intervening time. The city’s past, its role as the setting of The Trial, and the reality of its contemporary status all share a single, uncanny frame. In other pieces, in which the buildings in the film have since been remodeled, defaced, or destroyed, Welles’ characters inhabit environments that no longer exist. These works occupy a world that has, over years of political and economic transformation, become outmoded and been erased.

David Maljkovic lives and works in Zagreb. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2009); the Kunstverein Nürnberg (2008); the Kunstverein Hamburg (2007); P.S. 1, New York (2007) and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2007). His work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He was the 2010 recipient of the International Contemporary Art Prize Diputació de Castelló. This is his second one-person exhibition at Metro Pictures.