TARWUK emitthgiN tatvaC 2026

Present in both works is a motif drawn from a 2026 painting titled MRTISKLAAH_ećšiloduČ, which TARWUK created through a process of dialogue and spontaneity – painting and overpainting until the work was considered complete. As in the original painting, the prints show a dreamlike sea-gazing scene from Cavtat, Croatia, framed by two elusive figures and the gnarled trunk and overhanging foliage of a tree. By revisiting a motif first explored in the painting, TARWUK sought to explore the act and implications of reproduction itself – from the method of an image’s multiplication to the capacity of repetition to reveal difference. TARWUK’s prints engender the idea that reality is plural by definition and, accordingly, they present a single moment from two perspectives: day and night.

In this nighttime version, the green that animates the scene is offset by a doubling of the figures in blue, achieved by printing a second stone atop the first. This blue is reiterated in a dark swathe of night sky, accentuating the full moon that illuminates the destabilised scene. By contrast, in the daytime version, pink predominates, eliciting an overall late-day warmth while moss and soft taupe accents pick out the shadows of the relatively stable forms.

In these prints, day and night exist to describe two alternating conditions capable of revealing different aspects of reality, one destabilising the other. Reflecting TARWUK’s interest in dislocation and multiplicity – and calling to mind the duo’s cohabitation of a single artistic identity – the prints are less about oppositions than the coexistence of different perspectives, and the instability of a singular objective truth. As the artists describe: ‘Day and night are not understood here simply as opposites, nor as metaphors for consciousness and the unconscious. They are two modes through which the same world becomes perceptible. What appears stable during the day becomes strange at night; what seems absent in one state may become present in the other.’