Aleksandar Duravcevic: The Fold

TOTAH presents The Fold, an exhibition of recent work by Aleksandar Duravcevic, opening May 1, 2025. This is Duravcevic’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

With The Fold, Aleksandar Duravcevic introduces a new body of work that extends and reframes the conceptual arc of his YOUTH series. His polished stainless steel YOUTH works, where light and reflection play a central role in constructing the viewer’s relationship to absence and memory, are now extended in terms of materials and surface. Painted with oil and acrylic on linden wood boards, they extend the meditative significance of the earlier series, while introducing architectural features that allude to Byzantine influences on Duravcevic’s native Montenegro.

Repetition becomes hypnotic—each work conveys a sense of liturgical intimacy, echoing the dimensions, orientation, and rhythms of sacred Byzantine icons. Across canvas, bronze, steel, pigment, and panel, Duravcevic threads a consistent narrative. History, identity, and our sense of cultural belonging are transposed onto layered surfaces—material palimpsests—shaped by ancestral memory and myth as much as architectural fragments rooted in a particular time and place.

Visuals and meanings are interlinked. The transition from steel to wood is not a rupture, but a fold—part of Duravcevic’s ongoing examination of the limits of control, and the instability of perception. As with the earlier works, there remains a careful tension between minimalism and embellishment. The iridescence of the rainbow—recurrent across these new YOUTH works—emerges against oblong, architectural backdrops not as ornament but as a spectral presence: a fleeting reality between the seen and the sensed. Where the stainless steel works invited the viewer’s reflection as a kind of ghostly co-author, these wooden surfaces operate more as veils or thresholds—portals evoking a time or place that might never have existed. 

The Fold inhabits a liminal space: half architecture, half apparition. Duravcevic’s objects of remembrance—or perhaps imagining—recall places, persons, and histories that exist outside of documentarian specificity. Their purpose is not to represent but to evoke the enduring sensation of a presence just beyond the frame, leaving only a vestigial trace.

Aleksandar Duravcevic (b. 1970, Montenegro) studied in Cetinje and Florence, Italy, and holds an MFA from the Pratt Institute, New York. His body of work includes sculptures, drawings, photography, and paintings. Through them he explores identity and the multiplicity of belonging through ancestral habits and memory across cultures. Duravcevic received a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in 2005, and his work has been included in exhibitions at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, and MoMA PS1, New York. His work is part of the permanent collections at The Uffizi in Florence, The Brooklyn Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York among others. A native of Montenegro and its representative at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, he was included again as part of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 with the exhibition Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostru. Duravcevic lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Rigomagno, Italy.