Gašper Kunšič
Bridge to Morning
15/10 — 21/11/2025
Three sculptures form the center around which Gašper Kunšič’s exhibition Bridge to Morning unfolds. Entitled Night Travelers (2025), the three nudes face the viewers: life-sized, arms raised, legs bent, heads gently tilted. Their posture makes them appear not as if they were standing in a gallery, but rather on a dancefloor in the vibrant energy of a nightclub. The varnish, shimmering in the light, and ornamented stars transform them into “creatures of the night”—protectors and companions for those who move between darkness and dawn.
Rather than working with the sculptural logic of shaping mass to create volume, Kunšič uses negative forms, outlines and cuts made from monochrome-painted MDF. Curved lines define the contours, which are adorned with ornaments and volutes. The void, the absence, becomes a central component: even without “flesh,” they possess a physical presence—like ghosts. They are both static and scenic; their rigid form holds the potential for movement, as if they might, at any moment, shift their legs, find a rhythm, or change pose. Draped ribbons, machine-embroidered with symbols and syllables, embellish them with a “narrative skin” featuring signs and fragments of songs and poems that do not fade into oblivion but endure through ornament.
The Night Travelers are hybrid beings drawn from various iconographic sources: medieval and neoclassical depictions of saints are echoed in their posture and grandeur, as is the style of socialist realism with its heroic figures imbued with pathos. Representing a collision of cultures, they condense the artist’s biography and memories of Christian and folkloric motifs from his childhood in rural Slovenia, the cultural heritage of the former Yugoslavia, and his time in Vienna and Frankfurt am Main. He combines these influences with the aesthetics of pop and queer culture, incorporating glitter, stars and color codes. The result are figures that hover between saint and performer, guardian and dancer, poised on the threshold between invocation and ecstasy.
The sculptures are embedded within a larger ensemble. Reliefs in the shapes of doves and hearts hang on lavender walls. Everything appears in monochrome colors. Until about five years ago, Kunšič primarily worked with red, blue, and white—colors referencing his region of origin. This palette is more than a geopolitical reference; it carries memories and emotions. In recent years, the artist has undertaken what he calls a “queering” of these colors—a blending that led to violet. Today, a darker, more melancholic scale dominates, with industrially named tones such as “magician,” “freak,” and “galaxy”. Kunšič did not choose these colors for their names, but their tonal connotations resonated with his selection as affirmations. A large mural takes up the motif of the rainbow, but in fractured form—steeply jagged and pulsating in dark shades—a deliberate departure from overly stereotypical expectations.
A dark red sculpture sits in front of the mural, like a screen, fence, or grille. Permeable and walkable, it does not block the gaze. It is both ornamental and architectural. Where its structure comes into view, it acts as a filter over the backdrop. Patterns and shapes overlap. While ornamentation in Baroque architecture served to overwhelm and to stage power and representation, Adolf Loos, in his 1913 essay Ornament and Crime, declared it a cultural regression—excess without purpose. However, Kunšič overturns that dismissal: his reappropriation of ornamentation is a gesture of self-empowerment. Drawing on the aesthetics of camp, which embraces exaggeration, affect, and artificiality as strengths, he uses ornamentation excessively to affirm queer identity and resistance.
The exhibition is an elegy to pain and joie de vivre, attitude and resilience—the ability to persevere in the face of darkness and transform it into beauty. The energy of queer club culture, where performance, community, and emotion converge, permeates the works. They bring to mind Félix González-Torres, whose strategies of visibility and invisibility expressed queer identity and resilience.
They also recall Tom Burr, who explores the fragility and strength of queer spaces—places where life has been threatened, yet new forms of community, desire, and self-determination emerge. For Kunšič, too, the night embodies a place for community, protection, and survival. This becomes clear in an adjacent text by the artist on the wall:
AFTER ALL THIS TIME
COUNTLESS NIGHTS
HAVE CHANGED US
VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE
STRUGGLES
YEARS AS TEARS
PARTS OF US DIED
AND YET WE STILL
CHOOSE
THE DAWN
AGAIN
AND
AGAIN
Thus, the exhibition creates a space of transformation—a place between darkness and light, between past and present. Kunšič constructs a world that offers shelter, movement, emergence, and transitions: a bridge to morning.
TEXT: Marijana Schneider
Gašper Kunšič (1992, SI) recently graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, having previously studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In his practice he reworks visual references from the countryside of his childhood, alongside folk motifs and pop culture from the former Yugoslavia and a broader diasporic Balkan context. Through spatial interventions, sculptures, paintings and works on paper he transforms exhibition spaces into emotionally charged environments that subvert the traditional, creating new folklore worlds and their imaginings for those who do not belong. He has exhibited at Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Zilberman Gallery in Berlin, Belvedere21, Wien Museum MUSA, and House of Spouse in Vienna, Schiller-Museum in Weimar, the City Gallery, Škuc Gallery, and Ravnikar Gallery in Ljubljana, as well as UGM in Maribor. He has participated in the EKO Triennial of Art and Environment in Maribor, the Youth Biennial in Belgrade, and the Mediterranea Biennial in San Marino and Nova Gorica/Gorizia. He lives and works in Frankfurt am Main.
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