Mikael Olsson – Sodrakull Frosakull

FK05.2004

In this project Olsson has delved into the legacy of Bruno Mathsson, one of Sweden’s most important Modernist designers and architects.

Frösakull is a house Mathsson both designed and lived in. Olsson has interacted with the remains of the house, and like Mathsson he has experimented with the house and its possibilities. The result is a collection of images which show us an interpretation of an architectonic legacy. Olsson has arranged and transformed the rooms into a stage, often using light, emptiness and shadow as the only props.

The Södrakull residence, which had been closed off since Mathsson passed away, is approached in a different way: as a voyeur. The interiors are photographed from the outside and through half-drawn curtains. Olsson is here a surreptitious observer rather than participator and the images reflect an outsider’s fettered view of a private domain.

In this body of work Olsson has created an interplay between presence and absence, inner meaning and representation. The images are marked both by intimacy and distance. Together they form a sort of portrait, as well as a chronicle of architecture, remembrance and aging. For this reason the photographs cannot be considered documentary but instead a very subjective depiction of Mathsson’s public and private legacy.

This project includes an impressive monograph, published by Steidl Verlag, to be released this year. The book includes texts by Beatriz Colomina, Hans Irrek and Helena Mattsson. Designed by Acne Art Department and Mikael Olsson.

Mikael Olsson was born in Lerum, Sweden, 1969. He studied at Högskolan för Fotografi at Göteborgs University, 1993-96, Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 1995 and History and Theory in the Department for Architecture, Chalmers Tekniska Högskola i Göteborg, 2001-02. The premier of the film “Kosta 3:30”, a work also concerning one of Mathsson’s residences made by Mikael Olsson, Andreas Roth and Carsten Nicolai, was held at Moderna Museet in 2006. The exhibition Södrakull Frösakull  showed at the Hasselblad Center in Göteborg 2009. This is Mikael Olsson’s second exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake.

Galerie Nordenhake

TAJ MAHAL TRAVELLERS

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TAJ MAHAL TRAVELLERS

The Taj Mahal Travellers was a legendary Japanese improvisational group founded in 1969 by former Group Ongaku leader and Fluxus member Takehisa Kosugi. They combined Eastern and Western instruments, electronics and vocal chants, and used heavy post-production processing to create unique long flowing jams with deep organic droning and pulsing. Their music is considered to be the pinnacle of Asian psychedelic music of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their founder later became a classical composer, notably composing scores for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and presenting sound installations at a number of international art festivals. Between 1971 and 1972, invited by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, they toured much of Europe and Asia, mostly travelling around in a Volkswagen mini-bus, and even performing at the Taj Mahal in India.

The exhibition aims to recreate this experimental attitude with an openess to materials and conceptual positions outside a canonic perspective. The group of artists covers many generations who work in the visual sphere but suggests a cross-fertilization between different practices open to performance, music and dance.

The artists included in Taj Mahal Travellers continually blur the boudaries between process and material, pushing both to their extremes. In their works the artists explore the tensions between order and chaos, rigidity and pliability, geometric and biomorphic form, series and singularity, and continuity and change. Yet each work has an inner coherence; not the coherence of logical thought, but of a musical composition.

The exhibition will be complemented with documentation relating to the concert at Moderna Museet in July 1971.

ANNA BARHAM (UK, 1974)
SARA BARKER (UK, 1980)
HARIS EPAMINONDA (CYP, 1980)
JEF GEYS (BEL, 1934)
LYDIA GIFFORD (UK, 1979)
BENOIT MAIRE (FRA, 1978)
DAVIDE MINUTI (IT, 1973)
JIMMY ROBERT (FRA, 1975)
ALAN STANNERS (UK, 1985)
JOHN STEZAKER (UK, 1949)

Galerie Nordenhake

Eva Löfdahl

Untitled(1)

Eva Löfdahl

Eva Löfdahl (born 1953) gained attention for her work in the 1980’s and has continued to represent a unique voice in art coming out of Sweden.

Löfdahl uses unexpected materials and a visual language that are exclusively her own and while her works are densely complex they maintain a willingness to communicate. Her production and thinking relate closely to her own wanderings over the landscape, its boundaries, apertures and paths. In the spirit of this sense of openness and space Löfdahl’s sculptures seem to suggest potential movement and playfulness despite their static state.

An interest in science and language reflects an absorption in the rationality and irrationality of physics and numbers as well as issues of communication, representation and abstraction. However, in this exhibition of works from 2009 we not only witness a faithfulness to ideas but also a commitment to the physicality of things. In her sculptural practice Löfdahl explores volume and vacuum while combining familiar with classical and sometimes surprising materials such as plaster, foam and MDF or aluminium bricks and steel drill bits.

Through her concern with both real and abstract phenomena Löfdahl’s work explores a wide range of subjects. From the concrete in, for instance, the suggestion of adobe dwellings in ruin in Untitled, to the ephemeral in the embodiment of clouds and rain in Cloud to Be, and to the notional, in the representation of grammatical structures in Conjunction 1.

Eva Löfdahl represented Sweden at the Venice Biennial in 1995. In 2003 she completed a large-scale commission at Kalmar Stortorg, Sweden, and in 2006 a major public commission in Helsinki city center, Finland. This summer Löfdahl  had a critically acclaimed exhibition at Lund’s Konsthall, Sweden. Moderna Museet will hold a retrospective of her work in 2011. This is her fourth exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake.


Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm