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".

Irwin’s work is defined largely by three main principles. The first is the idea of building one’s own artistic position out of one’s particular circumstances; by being particular, art can become truly universal. The second is working in a group, a collective, or even an organization, shifting the emphasis away from the individual personality of the artist. The third is the fundamental NSK working procedure sometimes called the retro-principle. The latter principle gives rise to the concept known as “retroavantgardism” (or, later “retrogardism”). As the name implies, retroavantgardism is somewhat paradoxical because it calls for simultaneously looking backward (“retro”) and forward (“avant-garde”). This position is evident in the paradoxical title of an official statement of the group in 1987, “The Future is the seed of the past.” In essence, retroavantgardism consists in the recycled use of past symbols, images and philosophical ideas, particularly those that have been used by governments or other institutions to accumulate and hold power.

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