Constant Suffering for All at All Times

The central work of the exhibition is a dynamic sculpture entitled It’s all about sausage (Bezus Christus). It comprises an abstracted male nude reclining upon a monumental pink pedestal, his genitals tethered by a long leash; at the opposite end, the leash coils around the neck of a small puppy, whose head is replaced by a grotesquely enlarged and distorted smiling visage of Jeff Bezos. With this title and choice of medium, the artist explicitly references the renowned work Jesus. Es geht um die Wurst, created in 1992 by the American activist-artist Jimmie Durham for the Documenta IX exhibition. Durham’s sculpture, ironical and visually arresting (incorporating both manure and blood), destabilised conventional expectations surrounding sanctity, corporeality, and identity through its provocative, perverse, symbolic, and culturally subversive elements. Dvorščak’s work similarly deploys an unconventional image of a dog, an exposed penis, and an ambiguously poised, elongated nude figure. The pedestal upon which this figure lies inert is revealed, upon closer inspection, to represent a mother’s breasts; they symbolise the gradual process of weaning the child from breastfeeding (or from another desired object), thereby enabling the acquisition of autonomy, independence, and a semblance of freedom. The artist examines this process through a visual dialogue between the corporeal subject (the human figure) and the maternal breast, while introducing a third element: the symbol of an artificially constructed socio-economic system. Jeff Bezos, rendered as a capitalist autocrat, functions as an emblem of illusory power, of humanity’s assertion of dominion over reality, and of boundless control. Yet, in the artificially constructed vacuum of late capitalism, this authority generates a false sense of freedom that estranges the primary subject from authentic reality. The ordinary individual—unstable, only partially embodied, and not yet fully weaned—is wrenched from the security and comfort of maternal shelter by the isolating reality of contemporary Western society. Autonomy (and its consequent psychophysical oscillations) is thereby established in relation to the other, though (unfortunately) within an exploitative, competitive, individualised, and unrelenting system characteristic of late capitalism. The artist illustrates this absence of genuine freedom, as well as the emergence of impotence, through the leash tied around the reclining figure’s genitals. With its awkwardness and candour, this compelling sculpture discloses the prevailing spirit of the age, while encapsulating the artist’s reflections on entropy, human alienation, the irony of mental dissonance, and the unresolved question of subjective experience.

Patrik Dvorščak (1995) is a visual artist living and working in Ljubljana. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where in 2022 he completed his master’s degree with the thesis Unconscious and Primitive Human Behaviour. In 2024 he was shortlisted for the STRABAG Artaward International, having the year before received the PRIMAVERA Prize at the exhibition Vabljeni mladi at the Media Nox Gallery in Maribor. His work has been presented in numerous international exhibitions, including the Fourth International Print Biennale in Armenia, Redcar Summer Exhibition in the United Kingdom, Humorriots in Berlin, and REA Art Fair in Milan. In Slovenia, he has collaborated with several prominent institutions, among them the DLUM Gallery in Maribor, Generali Gallery, Kino Šiška, KIZC MORS – Ministry of Defence, Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana, the Kočevje Art Salon, and the Miklova hiša gallery in Ribnica.