Month: February 2009

Santiago Sierra


Santiago Sierra @ Magasin 3:: Stockholm Konsthall:::

Santiago Sierra makes the main exhibition at Magasin 3 this spring. Since the 1990s, Santiago Sierra has worked to create socially critical actions. He has represented Spain at the Venice Biennale where he bricked up the entrance to the Spanish pavilion, he has worked with drug addicts and prostitutes, and has created an income index related to skin color. Sierra’s works leave no one unmoved. By means of formal presentations or staged events, he places focus on and reminds us of societal conditions. The actual events, their traces and their documentation constitute the works. The artist uses the titles of the works to describe precisely what we are seeing and thereby invites us to look beyond the form or the action being performed.

Santiago Sierra will focus on the location of Magasin 3 in the free port when creating two new works. Transport and trade, exemplified by the port area, are important subjects in his artistic practice and will be the focus of the exhibition. The artist will show his most comprehensively challenging sculptural work to date, a piece from 2006-2007, and will extend the exhibition to billboards around the city.

Magasin 3

Compound Editions presents


Compound Editions is a collaborative fine art multiples publishing venture between Schroeder Romero and Winkleman Galleries.

Compound Editions is very pleased to announce the release of our second multiple, All Your Eggs, by Vermont-based sculptor Andy Yoder. Known for his sculptures of everyday objects made from unexpected materials that trigger childhood memories, tweak well-known metaphors, and offer a very American critique of social values, Yoder here combines a series of popular financial aphorisms into one fantastic piece of jumbled advice. Resting in a nest of shredded US currency, these gorgeous gold-gilded eggs hidden in a humble wooden case reference a series of folksy epigrams, from “Protect your nest egg” to “Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg,” from “Put something away for a rainy day,” to “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Solid advice in any economic climate, but particularly good to remember in these challenging times.

Schroeder Romero

HREINN FRIDFINNSSON


HREINN FRIDFINNSSON

Galerie Nordenhake is pleased to present an exhibition with new works and elaborations of previous projects by Icelandic artist Hreinn Fridfinnsson. His work could be described as discreet tributes to the poetry of small gestures.

Fridfinnsson gained prominence as a leading figure of the Icelandic avant-garde after co-founding the artist group SUM in 1965. A major retrospective of Fridfinnsson’s work, organized by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, documenting his ongoing influence for a younger generation of artists, was on view at the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Reykjavik Art Museum in 2007 and traveled to Bergen Kunstmuseum and the Malmö Konsthall in 2008.

Fridfinnsson’s art is rooted in the memories and experiences of his native Iceland and its contrasting landscapes. At times, he echoes the lyricism of a wandering bard, recounting legends, rumours, secrets, and dreams, sometimes telling a story, other times describing a place or an event. All these aspects are embodied by his new photographic series Second House. The images are a documentation of a further development of his House Project from 1974, an installation inspired by the tale of an eccentric Icelander who built a house inside out.

Fridfinnssons’s work can take almost any form: crystal turning to stars; frottage that evokes the artist’s own studio; a silvery pencil rubbing of Cezanne’s Mont St Victoire. In Whatever Time We Choose (1999), for example, the artist creates an installation made out of an undefined number of crystals that recalls an imaginary constellation of stars. Alongside this work Fridfinnsson presents From Mont Sainte-Victoire (1998), a series of fifteen frottage works, lovingly tracing the very ground of Cezanne’s muse as if he were making a brass rubbing. The same kind of technique has been deployed by the artist in reproducing the visual patterns composing his studio’s floor. A pile of these drawing is then gently agitated by two small fans thus allowing the artist to give the illusion of a minimal action and its time. In both works the historically charged technique of the frottage connects the everyday and the magical through the poetic and ironic presence of the! artist. The diversity of media, which Fridfinnsson utilizes consistently reflects the artist’s complex visual language, each work imbued with simultaneous instances of humour and wonder.

Born in 1943 in Baer Dölum, Iceland, Hreinn Fridfinnsson has been living in Amsterdam since 1971. He has had solo exhibitions at: Malmö Konsthall (2008); Reykjavik Art Museum and Serpentine Gallery, London (both 2007); Domaine de Kerguehennec, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Bignan, and Kyoto Art Center (both 2002). In 1993 he exhibited at the National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik (1993) and represented Iceland at the 45th Venice Biennial. His work has also been featured in group shows including Material Time/ Work Time/ Life Time, Reykjavik Arts Festival (2005), Eblouissement, Jeau de Paume, Paris (2004), Norden, Kunsthalle Wien, the Carnegie Art Award, (both 2000), Sleeping Beauty–Art Now, Scandinavia Today, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1983). In 2000, the artist was the recipient of the prestigious Ars Fennica prize. Hreinn Fridfinnsson has been exhibiting with Galerie Nordenhake since 1989! .

Nordenhake