Natalie Perkof, Urban Shaman
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
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| Description | This art-historical study focuses on the painting Urban Shaman by the painter Natalie Perkof, which she presented at an exhibition at Prague's (A)void Gallery in 2021. Perkof conceived the exhibition, which thematises the role of spirituality in the contemporary, material-based world, as a site-specific installation. She created a meditative visual-acoustic space in the middle of a busy waterfront, culminating in the painting Urban Shaman. She created the large-scale monochrome image using carbon fibre, which she formed into a male silhouette. The use of a dark fabric with a metallic sheen evokes the archaic cosmological idea of cosmic matter through which different levels of the universe permeate through the stars. The depiction of the shaman as an ordinary man brings us back to the level of the material, sensual world. Perkof conceives of the shaman as a person who is able to mediate contact between the different levels of the world not through states of ecstasy and magical archaic rituals, but through meditation and harmony with nature, embedded in the world of our everyday life. |