The single biggest art project in Chicago this spring, at least in terms of surface area, is a new commission by Nora Turato, the Croatian graphic designer-turned-multidisciplinary artist, for Art on the Mart, the public series that projects art onto the 2.5-acre exterior of the former Merchandise Mart building. Her projection (12 April-5 June) builds on recent projects including a commission for the 2023 Performa Biennial in New York and solo shows at Sprüth Magers’s spaces in Berlin (last year) and Los Angeles (until 27 April).
Running through all these projects, and playing across the Mart’s hulking exterior on the banks of the Chicago River, is Turato’s interest in the culture of self-optimisation and the language of wellness culture and quasi-spiritual self-improvement incantations. Like a Millennial take on Jenny Holzer’s Truisms (1978-82), Turato’s works isolate and amplify found sentences and phrases—“because goals”, “unlock everything”, “govern me harder”—in funny and stark compositions rendered in videos, murals, performances and enamel-on-steel panels.
“Everybody’s reading, everybody’s looking, everybody sees these things, I’m not bringing anything new to the table; it’s just that I’m the only one who stops and writes it down,” Turato has said of her process. “When you seek it out, it doesn’t work… You just have to live, you have to expose yourself to the content.” Visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago will also be exposed to Turato’s content when she performs there on 13 April.
