Antonia Gurkovska, Index: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL, 60607

Kavi Gupta is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition for Antonia Gurkovska entitled Index. Using materials that stand on the periphery of painterly tradition, such as vinyl, latex, staples, packing material, and found fabrics, Gurkovska’s works are critical of the repetitious gestures, marks and interior formal structures that define their aesthetic. Reminiscent of artists Lucio Fontana, Gustav Metzger and Rudolf Stingel the works Gurkovska has included in Index are deliberate in their rough hewn state and almost always involve a cutting or puncturing of the pictorial plane. Works like the Eponymous Index (2011) or Holes Of Steel (2011) are epitomic of Gurkovska’s use of negative space or the absence of material as a primary subject in a work’s composition. However, unlike the Arte Povera approach of Fontana, Gurkovska’s work often presents this canvas cutting only to unveil a secondary plane beneath, suggesting that the aesthetic structure that gives a work its form is never singular, but multiple and fractal.

Antonia Gurkovska was born in 1984 in Sofia, Bulgaria. She received her BFA from the National Academy of Art, Bulgaria in 2008 and her MFA from The Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. Recent exhibitions include Summer, Kavi Gupta, Chicago; Cultural Identity, Sofia, Bulgaria; New Insight, curated by Suzanne Ghez, NEXT, Chicago; and Irritable Abstraction, Julius Ceasar, Chicago.

Gurkovska was recently awarded the Fulbright Scholarship (2009-2011) as well as the George and Ann Siegel Fellowship from the Art Institute of Chicago. Gurkovska currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.