IRWIN

IRWIN is a collective of Slovenian artists, primarily painters, and an original founding member of Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK).

In 1983, the artists Dušan Mandič, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik, coming from the punk and graffiti scene in Ljubljana, formed an artistic group and called it Rrose Irwin Sélavy. This name had a reference to Marcel Duchamp, who used "Rrose Sélavy" (like eros c'est la vie) as one of his feminine pseudonyms. The group would soon shorten the name to R Irwin S.In 1984, the group co-founded a larger collective known as Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). Acting as the fine arts wing of the group, they joined the musical group Laibach, and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre group. Soon after the formation of the larger collective, R Irwin S changed its name to simply Irwin.

In 1987, IRWIN, Novi Kolektivizem and Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre were involved in one of the greatest art scandals in the history of Yugoslavia when they proposed a poster, based on a Nazi kunst poster, for the celebration of the Youth Day, Tito's birth anniversary. In the history of art, this scandal is known as the Poster Scandal. In 2012, D'Art documentaries production is to release a 1-hour documentary about the scandal, entitled "The Fine Art of Mirroring".In August 2022, Uranjek died of suicide in Ljubljana at the age of 60. At time of his death he was connected to alleged sexual abuse and financial manipulation circle.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023