展览预告|马特亚·里斯蒂奇:这究竟算是艺术吗?

Halcyon Gallery Shanghai is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Ist das etwa Kunst？Serbian artist Mateja Ristić, on view from May 9 to May 30, 2026.

Based in Shanghai, the interdisciplinary artist explores the essence of art, judgment, value, and discursive power. Through performance video and paintings, he creates striking tension between rigorous geometric structures and expressive color fields, returning the authority of artistic judgment to the audience with open, untitled works. Confronting the dilemmas of postmodern art, he redefines perception and expression in contemporary culture with profound conceptual and visual strength.

Ist das etwa Kunst ?

The performance video work Is This Art? (Ist das etwa Kunst, Mateja Ristić?) is a tribute by Serbian artist Mateja Ristić to his predecessor Raša Todosijević. Whereas Todosijević invited his wife to act as a silent audience and repeatedly questioned her on “what is art”, Mateja reverses this dynamic: he invites his own wife to participate in the performance, as she repeatedly interrogates him with the question “Is this art?” while slapping and striking his face. The entire process unfolds like a soul-searching inquiry, with Mateja remaining embarrassed and speechless throughout.

The question of what art is extends far beyond Mateja’s personal confusion. Looking back through history, it is clear that art has long suffered from a double crisis: first, a crisis of value, especially after the two World Wars, when artists worldwide rushed to justify the social value of art; second, an ontological crisis, as Joseph Beuys’ bold declaration that “everyone is an artist” took hold, coupled with the explosive growth of media for artistic creation and dissemination after the millennium, allowing anything to become art. This postmodern “implosion” of meaning has drained art of its inherent significance through overproduction and endless replication.

Furthermore, the destructive force of this meaning implosion has also affected the criteria for judging art and the question of who holds the authority to judge. Today, art is no longer defined by an absolute “is” (ist), but at most a tentative “is perhaps” (etwa). Unlike the objective statement of “is”, “is perhaps” is fundamentally a subjective judgment. A brief examination of the semantic difference between the two terms reveals that the problem raised by “is perhaps” lies not in the internal standards of art, but in who holds the external authority to judge—and by what criteria such discursive power is exercised.

Who has the right to decide what art is? The artist, curator, institution, market, or the audience? This is the crux of the anxiety that Mateja must confront. For this reason, he transfers the authority of judgment to the audience in the exhibition. Alongside the performance video, the exhibition presents 18 easel paintings in acrylic and mixed media. These works blend stark straight lines and geometric forms with emotional color fields, with brushwork oscillating between restraint and abandon, featuring both perfect, ordered shapes and highly symbolic expressions. Mateja deliberately leaves the works untitled, welcoming the audience’s scrutiny with an open attitude. Perhaps, for him, the role of the contemporary artist is to remove all interference, let the audience confront the work itself, and ultimately ask:Ist das etwa Kunst, Mateja Ristić?

Mateja Ristić is a Shanghai-based interdisciplinary artist and visual theory researcher. His practice spans painting, installation, performance and transmedia work. His art explores the shifting boundaries between authorship, perception and cultural value in the context of contemporary technology. Ristić holds a PhD in Polymedia Art from the University of Arts in Belgrade. He is currently an associate professor at the School of Media, Communication and Design Art at Wenzhou Business College, and also serves as the Creative Ambassador of Serbia. Over the past two decades, his works have been widely exhibited at major art platforms across Europe and Asia.