‘The idea of something being turned inside-out, turned-in, or folded back on itself.’ That’s all the press release has to say on ‘Invagination’, the title of this exhibition. Which is to skirt the obvious reference – unless I’m reading into things a bit too much.
If there’s something bodily going on in this series of sculptures, it’s in vague and suggestive ways. The Serbian artist works with impersonal, industrial materials such as concrete and polyurethane, and titles each piece ‘Exhibition Element’ followed by an anonymous code and number. The sheets of silicone hanging in some pieces look unpleasantly like jaundiced skin, and a teak floor piece resembles a dorsal fin. But that’s as specific as Šarčević’s work gets. Largely, it follows the bog-standard rules of contemporary formalist sculpture: fiddly, mannered and wrapped up in its own sense of drama.
The real heart of the show lies sitting in the centre of the final space: a huge, boxy construction made of plasterboard and ribbed lengths of polyurethane. It’s not a room-within-a-room, since there’s no interior. Nor is it quite an installation. It’s almost like some freestanding unit that does absolutely nothing except look weird. Where the smaller works are conceits, this is a big, unanswerable problem. Walk around it and you’ll find little incidents propped up with typical offhandedness – like a plastic bag filled with dried meat. Which explains the pet shop smell, anyway.