Performance / Photographic Work

Installations and Sculpture

Watercolours and My Name is Pablo Picasso Series

Film Posters

In these works Rasa fuses his idiosyncratic yet sophisticated graphic style and symbolic devices with seductive and polished language of mass media and advertising. This approach gently satirises the  international style of graphic design, and yet highlights the picturesque in his own work.

RASA TODOSIJEVIC

Rasa Todosijevic’s seminal “Was ist Kunst?” (“what is Art?”) action is representative of his confrontational and politically charged approach to performance, and to his perspective on art in general. This 1976 work consisted of the artist touching, slapping and smearing the face of his female assistant while demanding an answer to his interrogation, 'What is Art?'. It is a discourse on authoritarianism whilst questioning and satirising the nature of art itself, a duality which is prevalent throughout Rasa’s work.

In art and memory, as the artist describes: “I sat by the table with a microphone and started recalling the names of all the artists I know... I instinctively helped myself following some historical chronology: Sumerian, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Crete, Greeks and so on until the Modern age, the twentieth century.” The performance relates to the continuity and longevity of art history as a source of it validation, but also to the subjective art history that exists within the mind of each artist, and which defines their practice. “My memory is the boundary of my history of art.”

The swastika is a recurring theme within Rasa’s work. Rejecting an obvious reading, these swastika constructions do not relate directly Nazism, but rather deal with how symbols acquire and communicate meaning. The swastika can be traced back to prehistoric India, and has been used by cultures across the globe as a religious symbol of good luck and well being. Its origins have even been posited as a representation of comets, or a function of the brain’s visual cortex during meditation. Its appropriation by the Nazis to validate their Aryan mythology, and its subsequent unbreakable association with evil reveals the almost supernatural power symbols exert over us.

For an artist who primarily works with found objects and readymades in the Neo Dada tradition, Rasa’s watercolours present a more intimate, intuitive and psychological portrait beneath the political and theoretical discourse. However the same obsessions and symbolic references still prevail.

In his series My Name is Pablo Picasso, he consciously adopts the “handwriting” of Picasso, both out of admiration and a questioning of the nature of artistic genius