While Matej Andraž Vogrinčič is known mostly for his artistic activities on the Slovenian and international contemporary art scene, it should be noted at the outset that his spatial installations tell little stories about the unusual intricacies of everyday life which often help to transcend the narrowly defined field of art. Vogrinčič performed his first intervention in public space over twenty years ago, when he ‘dressed’ a house on the embankment of Ljubljanica River and offered a fresh reflection on public site-specific installation in Slovenia. A few years later, he presented the project Suitcase with a Shirt (1997) at the 2^nd Triennial of Contemporary Slovene Arts at the invitation of the curator Peter Weibel, which revived ideas of the historical avant garde. Perhaps this project was one of his defining moments, as it related Vogrinčič’s art to the international contemporary art arena. After 2000, Vogrinčič realised numerous site-specific projects in Slovenia and internationally. His artistic practice has always remained faithful to the principle of starting from the characteristics of a space, which is then re-shaped by the artist with his specific and recognisable personal poetics, ‘anchored’ in different conceptual starting points and given new possibilities for symbolic readings. In this context, the white watering can, the basic element of the Moon Plain (2002), symbolically deploys the only colour not naturally found in the colour spectrum of the desert. Or, in a similar context the highlighting of hidden social specifics, which Vogrinčič revealed with his perhaps most recognisable installation Untitled (56 boats). Commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial 2006, Vogrinčič filled the ruins of St Luke’s church with 56 green boats to tell a story about how residents of Liverpool spent their free time at the beginning of the 20^th century, while establishing a tension between the objects and neo-Gothic elements with careful formal precision. But Vogrinčič’s stories are not always anchored only in a contemporary dialogue with history, traditions and spatial characteristics. The artist always leaves the door open for a departure into the unknown, the unpredictable. This is perhaps most directly addressed by the projects Škuc Bake Shop (2009) and the installation Swimming Pool (after Hockney), which was done in 2012 on the roof of an office building in Maribor. Škuc Bake Shop was his first intervention that did not focus on the object, but instead set up a place of social exchange, an element that had disappeared from Škuc Gallery mid-1990s, in real time and space. A specific conceptual upgrade of this is the intervention Swimming Pool (after Hockney), which can be understood as a significant turn in his work, as there are multiplied elements, but do not form a precise composition. In the text accompanying the exhibition I don’t know, where the work was presented, the curator, Simona Vidmar said that by introducing basic swimming elements and glossy Californian colours into a bleak lighting shaft in an office building, the intervention is transformed into a witty and haunting illusion of a pool, which is both provocative and suggestive.

An overview of selected projects by Vogrinčič can also serve to provide a wider context for his work in the last twenty years, although this is mainly focused on highlighting the different paths that come together in the Mass project, which the artist presents in the lobby of the TR3 office building in collaboration with Steklarna Hrastnik glassworks. Collaboration between Vogrinčič and Steklarna Hrastnik began in 2012, when he created the Impilabile installation in the Sodni stolp in Maribor for the European Culture Capital. It should be said that the Mass project is more complex, as it also includes a reflection on the artist’s previous projects. As in most of his work, Vogrinčič tries to insert the uniqueness of the space, transform it with intervention and enrich it with a new dimension. The TR3 office building is a very difficult site for an intervention, as it is protected as a monument and there are many safety regulations and administrative obstacles because it is being used as offices. The restrictive factors became crucial and urged Vogrinčič to think about the possibilities of transforming space. The main issue addressed by the artist was how to penetrate the monotony of an empty office building, which Marc Augé would define as a non-place. Due to their fleeting nature, non-places have erased the issues related to identity and relationships and are dedicated exclusively to certain rituals of the individual, so we do not notice them or do not think about them. This presupposition led to the main thesis of the artist’s intervention, which is based on the principle of establishing an antithesis to the space in which it is positioned. In this case, this does not entail changing its function, which was the original idea when the project was being conceived, but rather creating discomfort by the almost excessive use of multiplied objects. In collaboration with Steklarna Hrastnik, the artist tested several types of glass, their texture and purity, for several months before making the intervention, to find the most appropriate one. During the rigorous lengthy process, he managed to create or accumulate the mass of objects, with which he began to intervene in the premises of the building. At the formal level, glass and its treatment enabled the artist contact with material, the indirect creation of an object and later its endless multiplication and positioning in a strictly defined non-place. In addition, the presence of mass seeks to highlight what lies beyond the perception of the human eye and hapticity, which can only be experience by complementing the rational, aesthetic and sensory. Vogrinčič’s intervention, its physical and non-physical aspects, do not form a whole, as the final perception depends mainly on the spectator. This somewhat shifts the perception of the spectator, which is based on the experience of space and physical reality. The artist removes the primary function of everyday objects both at physical and symbolic levels and puts them into completely new relationships with space in some type of suspension. Through their own experience of material reality, memories and space, the spectator can complete the work. Vogrinčič’s intervention also raises another question: the limit of a place. What limits a place? Is it a wall as an immediate physical obstacle, or is it the potential inability of the spectator to make a transition from a physical to the non-physical perception of a work?

With his latest site-specific installation, entitled Mass, Matej Andraž Vogrinčič proves yet again that space can be used to precisely define an object and create interdependence between the two, as an object cannot function without space or vice versa. In addition to the main conceptual arch that establishes a relationship between the object and space, ephemeral and fleeting qualities should also be noted, as they additionally provoke the spectator’s experience of existence and the relationship with the “eternalisation” of a work of art. By deconstructing and examining the possibilities of a space and its connection with the endless mass of devalued consumer objects, Vogrinčič has created a new place of (self)reflection. Mass physically presses the spectator to the ground, while relentlessly confronting them with the eerie everyday emptiness of the given space.