Jelena Telecki Mothers, Fathers

In Mothers, Fathers Jelena Telecki deftly handles the complexity of her exhibition’s perennial, titular subjects—parenthood, childhood, ancestry, and inheritance. Her first solo exhibition at a major Australian gallery is a haunting exploration of universal themes, but a further, stated intent to grapple with Yugoslavian history proves more elusive.

Nespokojstvo (foreboding uneasiness) is the Serbian word Jelena Telecki offers for the mood underlying the nine works in Mothers, Fathers. It is her debut solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the first in the Gallery’s inaugural Contemporary Projects series to showcase New South Wales artists. With a subdued palette of grey-blues and black, slick surfaces, theatrical compositions, and a cast of ghostly characters, the promise of nespokojstvo is fulfilled by an icy, ethereal suite.

The paintings Mothers, 2023, and Fathers, 2023, are the exhibition’s largest and most imposing presences. Hung at the rear corners of the room, they make effective use of the new Naala Badu / North Building’s high ceilings. At first blush, the works appear to be trompe-l’oeil depictions of marble busts in architectural niches. But a moment’s reflection proves that these faces have soft, not sculpted, features. They are closer to brunaille underpaintings, waiting to spring into colour by the artist’s hand. These may well be living subjects—death-pale, emerging from the gloam like figures from a Keatsian ballad.

The effect is amplified by trains of canvas, sullied by paint and dirt, that cascade beneath each figure and rest upon the gallery floor—moments of grit in an exhibition otherwise without blemish. Telecki has used these sculptural elements in previous series, from folded canvas to mimic the curtains of windows and peep shows, through to painted portraits hidden in found object sculptures. So too, the device of a cartouche enveloping a bust appeared in Telecki’s work since at least 2010. The return and merger of these two features is thoughtfully calibrated to the exhibition site.

Flanked by Mothers and Fathers is a work at the altarpiece of Telecki’s dream-hall: Majka, 2023. Unsurprisingly, the title means mother. A pregnant woman, fully clothed in black leather, stands cropped at the shoulders and waist. At her nipples hang a pair of pearl droplets. With so few elements, the work is rich in subtext, wit, and implication. Mother’s milk is equated to nacre in preciousness and value. The black gimp suit implies nakedness, carnal, despite the absence of exposed skin. Pregnancy here is not just the promise of new life, but evidence of sex. Cropped, leather-clad torsos appear in two further canvases: Expecting Couple, 2024, where the eponymous, soon-to-be parents stand front-to-back in their gimp suits. And Inheritance, 2023, where a decidedly not pregnant woman is cinched at the waist in a painful, possibly suggestive manner.

Telecki was born in Split in the former Yugoslavia. She was an infant when Josip Broz Tito died, an adolescent when the Berlin Wall fell, a young adult when she fled the Yugoslav Wars. History is expressly evoked by the exhibition’s introductory text but is overt in only one painting, Partizanke, 2023, of two female Yugoslav Partisans lying in an ethereal forest. Asleep (or dead), one holds an undetonated grenade, with the suggestion of a pulled pin resting below. Each wears the titovka (the Partisans’ distinctive green cap) emblazoned with the red star, worn during the anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War.

Aside from this, the artist and the curator leave few clues for the viewer to engage historically with the works. A case in point is a seemingly innocuous painting of a house beneath a white sheet with window-eyes cut out, like a child dressed as a ghost. The title of the work, Kuća malog Jože (Little Joža’s house), 2024, only hints at its true subject—Tito’s childhood home—by way of a little-known, boyhood nickname.

This quiet inclusion of Tito’s home is not something visitors can glean from the face of the work or text in the exhibition. It is mentioned only briefly by curator Johanna Bear in “Thicker than water” an essay for Look, the Gallery members’ magazine, April–May, 2024. It lets the show off easy to chalk up the paucity of descriptive labels (two, from a show of nine works) to a deliberate sense of mystery, continuing the sense of “foreboding uneasiness.” Indeed, surely the nespokojstvo is only heightened once Tito’s presence is known. Art should, of course, speak for itself—but without providing audiences sufficient clues to follow, the mystery is not just insoluble, it is invisible.

Mothers, Fathers is an exhibition of absence and implication. The more time one spends reflecting on these paintings of the living dead, the unborn, the ageing, and the disappeared, the deeper one feels that sense of the unknown. As an exploration of human relationships, the works are impressive, elegant, and considered. If that were all the show intended to impart it would be enough and done well. But for an exhibition that also promises to raise historical questions, one expects that audiences should at least have the means—curatorial, if not visual—to attempt to find some answers.

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 67

EXHIBITION
Jelena Telecki Mothers, Fathers 
9 March – 2 June 2024 
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney