[TARWUK] A COUNTRY THAT STOPPED EXISTING

Walk into the ground-floor gallery at White Cube's Mason's Yard and you cannot find one place to stand and see everything. The central assemblage — the artists call it a "harmonic percolator" — keeps changing meaning as you move around it. There is no correct angle.

That refusal to hold still is not a formal trick. It is close to autobiography.

TARWUK is the shared name of Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić, born the same year, 1981, in two different Croatian cities — Zagreb and Dubrovnik — into a country that would not exist by the time they finished growing up. Both came of age during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Since 2014 they have worked as a single artistic entity under one name. They call it, simply, a "condition."

The new large-scale canvas anchoring this show — titled, in TARWUK's signature mirrored lettering, MRTISKLAAH_ećšiloduČ (2026) — makes that instability visible on the surface itself. Figures dissolve into one another mid-gesture; the paint handling shifts registers within a single passage. Nothing in the composition offers a stable vantage point to view it from — which is, per the artists themselves, the entire point.

Theirs is a practice built almost entirely from instability. Paintings carry titles spelled backward. Two video monitors bookend the current installation: one plays thirteen one-minute films shot during the full and new moons of 2024; the other shows the two artists talking about drawing, the one medium that has traveled with them through every studio, every city.

For nearly two decades, that instability extended to geography itself. TARWUK's paintings drew on myth, anime, Renaissance painting, Yugoslav cinema — everywhere except an actual, locatable place.

This show breaks that pattern. One new painting depicts somewhere real: the small Croatian village where their families still live. The vivid orange dominating it came from the studio of the late American painter Ron Gorchov, whose widow let TARWUK work there after his death. They carried the leftover paint from studio to studio across New York for years, unused, before it finally found a place to go.

A studio's worth of someone else's paint, carried city to city for years before it was finally used up on the one place that never stopped being real to them — does using it up mean the mourning is finished, or does it mean something is only now beginning?