Artefacts bear fruit

Braco Dimitrijevic: Broken By Chance

The Bosnian-born artist Braco Dimitrijevic typically incorporates past artworks into his 3D installations: a wooden handcart loaded with potatoes in which the centrepiece was Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters constituted one recent work.

This single work commissioned by Medievalmodern places a few medieval artefacts into three large glass panes, stacked one behind the other and cut into jagged forms.

There's a medieval manuscript painting depicting a burial scene, a 15th-century sword and a 13th-century stone carving of the head of a queen from Chartres Cathedral.

Among these gallery-owned items, Dimitrijevic has placed a teacup, six lemons and a hammer. The blurb suggests that the work 'confronts us with a six-century time span accessed in a single act of viewing'. While studying these disparate objects, a few possible interpretations lend themselves, though only after some effort, and none wholly convincingly.

Perhaps you think of the way these objects have been used in the history of art (those lovely Chardin lemons) or perhaps you just think of Dimitrijevic's fondness for citrus fruit. What comes more immediately to mind is the singular surrealism of Magritte.

Dimitrijevic came up through the ranks of conceptualism in the 1970s, and one probably gets something of his general drift from his grandly paradoxical quasi-philosophy: 'There are no mistakes in history, all history is a mistake.' Like the work, you can make of that what you will.