ADHD
2024.
This exhibition presents the works of Klara Rusan a.k.a « Klarxy » which narrate a story of a brain affected by ADHD.
These drawings will tell you about the formation of thoughts in ADHD conditions, how intrusive thoughts arise from the disorder that disrupts regular thoughts, and what it’s like to navigate through education in such conditions…
The artist’s starting point for this project is her personal experience – a few years ago, when her friends asked her about her thought process, she illustrated it by using the motif of a large Olympic swimming pool (representing the brain) crowded with swimmers (representing different thoughts). Upon receiving the official diagnosis of her condition, she decided to start a large, potentially lifelong art project using the same motif as its point of departure.
The exhibition was designed with the idea of its continuous expansion at the forefront. The artist started with pencil drawings and illustrations done in ink and white acrylic, leaving open the eventual possibility of transition to digital illustration, graphics, or painting.
Her works range from smaller formats to others covering whole walls, all in the spirit of ADHD, creating a multi-faced and dynamic omnibus of different experiences and stories.
During the exhibition visitors will also be able to see older works, prints and her graphic novel ‘Where Do People Go After They Die?’.
« Exhibiting a playful horror vacui, her works possess a strong magnetic attraction. She plays on the border of comics, illustrations, and nightmares, simultaneously childlike and dead serious. Her works are filled with hundreds, thousands, millions of details, the little things in which you can recognise yourself and which seem like a part of your everyday life, but cleverly distorted in a way to achieve the most important thing in all of art – to help you see the world around you in a new way, to notice something new in what you have seen countless times, and to remind you that things are rarely as they seem. Once you dive in the author’s thought pool, once you step into her brain and walk around her apartment, chances are you will not want to leave. «
– Andrija Škare, from the exhibition catalogue.
These drawings will tell you about the formation of thoughts in ADHD conditions, how intrusive thoughts arise from the disorder that disrupts regular thoughts, and what it’s like to navigate through education in such conditions…
The artist’s starting point for this project is her personal experience – a few years ago, when her friends asked her about her thought process, she illustrated it by using the motif of a large Olympic swimming pool (representing the brain) crowded with swimmers (representing different thoughts). Upon receiving the official diagnosis of her condition, she decided to start a large, potentially lifelong art project using the same motif as its point of departure.
The exhibition was designed with the idea of its continuous expansion at the forefront. The artist started with pencil drawings and illustrations done in ink and white acrylic, leaving open the eventual possibility of transition to digital illustration, graphics, or painting.
Her works range from smaller formats to others covering whole walls, all in the spirit of ADHD, creating a multi-faced and dynamic omnibus of different experiences and stories.
During the exhibition visitors will also be able to see older works, prints and her graphic novel ‘Where Do People Go After They Die?’.
« Exhibiting a playful horror vacui, her works possess a strong magnetic attraction. She plays on the border of comics, illustrations, and nightmares, simultaneously childlike and dead serious. Her works are filled with hundreds, thousands, millions of details, the little things in which you can recognise yourself and which seem like a part of your everyday life, but cleverly distorted in a way to achieve the most important thing in all of art – to help you see the world around you in a new way, to notice something new in what you have seen countless times, and to remind you that things are rarely as they seem. Once you dive in the author’s thought pool, once you step into her brain and walk around her apartment, chances are you will not want to leave. «
– Andrija Škare, from the exhibition catalogue.
