codice chronicles + vibration translations

31 May - 28 June

Finissage: 3pm Saturday 28 June

STATION
9 Ellis Street, South Yarra, Victoria, Australia

On the closing day of the exhibition, Saturday 28 June at 3pm, please join Tomislav Nikolic in conversation with Alex Bacon.

codice chronicles + vibrant translations presents new bodies of work that delve deeper into the artist’s ongoing exploration of symbolic systems and metaphysical inquiry. The word ‘codice’ evokes an ancient system of communication; an idea that deeply resonates with Nikolic’s practice, which often explores how humans attempt to decode and assign meaning to forces beyond our comprehension. In his twelve painting series, the artist turns to astrological beliefs and their elemental divisions—earth, water, fire, and air—as one of many frameworks humans have constructed to rationalise the mysteries of the universe. These symbolic systems speak to a timeless and deeply human impulse that is the desire to impose coherence on the unknowable, and to ultimately locate ourselves amidst the cosmos. Through this lens, Nikolic’s paintings become meditative spaces, prompting viewers to reflect on their own cosmic insignificance amidst the vast and unfathomable expanse of the infinite.

Alex Bacon is an art historian, who has been based in New York and, most recently, London. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. He is also a publisher of Circle Books and Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail, and regularly writes criticism for magazines such as Artforum, Art Monthly, Mousse and Kaleidoscope. From 2017 to 2020 he was a Curatorial Associate at the Princeton University Art Museum, where he led the campus public art program and programmed a series of first institutional exhibitions of emerging artists at the museum’s offsite space Art@Bainbridge. He is currently finishing his PhD in Art & Archaeology at Princeton University on the late black paintings of Ad Reinhardt.