Month: August 2009

Some brand new Husk Mit Navn from the street::::
Husk Mit Navn

Some new stuff from the master::::…

Cope 2

LEIF HOLMSTRAND: What the Others Knew

 

Johan Berggren Gallery is pleased to announce as it’s inaugural
exhibition, a solo presentation of Malmö based artist Leif Holmstrand
(b. 1972). Holmstrand has exhibited widely in various contexts during
the past decade, earning a name for himself as both a performance artist
and a critically acclaimed visual artist. Not to forget his position as
one of the leading poets of a younger generation.

 

The current exhibition consists of two parts. The first being a large
scale installation in the front room of the gallery. The stage is set by
a number of sculptural elements resulting in a tense and somewhat
claustrophobic environment contextualising ideas, motifs and techiques
from an earlier body of works. However the ongoing storytelling,
emmanating from a performative experience about body & gender, history &
identity is boundary breaking. Whether inside of the installation or
viewing the room from the outside, past as well as a notion of now are
transcended, resulting in what could best be described as a timeless
psychodrama.

 

In the second room of the gallery the setting is different. In the
sparse and serene environment we witness ”what the others knew”. An
overlapping documentation of the actual making of the installation ”What
the Others Knew” has resulted in an intricate series of photographs
where pivotal moments in the making are paired with cerebral lines of
thought. At a critical spot in the room a sculptural self-portrait ”Hon
ligger i delar” rests and accentuates the context and could be seen as
an epicentre around which the exhibition is evolving or ending.

 

An earlier exhibition in the spring 2009, at the gallery’s premises on
Östra Tullgatan, was a ”mini-retrospective” and a testbed that saw
mainly sculptural objects by Holmstrand from the past ten years coming
together for the first time. In the current exhibition Holmstrand’s
overall aim has been to move beyond the singular object as a brick in a
narrative play. Instead Holmstrand swaps the ideal of the isolated
object for a more open ended, scenographic and challenging environment.

 
Johan Berggren

Total Revolution constitutes an arena for a duel on opinions and conceptions. Written in neon, burned on canvas, illuminated on a chain link fence, in video, through sound and photography Sonne questions the way we experience and interpret. What is meaning and who defines it?

Using paradox as ammunition, Sonne attacks the categorical truths that normally overwrite nuances. Cultural references and powerful concepts such as freedom, power, truth and lie – concepts, which often serve as the foundation of Western discourse – are being scrutinized with a smile and twist of mind. Sonne’s works turns into a playful Morse system, where the only dictionary is the beholder’s world perception.

Manipulating well-established signs and symbols, investigating, inventing, reusing and renovating self-contradictory words, sentences and objects. Sonne revels in dualities, whether it is in the form of material (synthetic/natural), production (industrial/hand made), form (geometrical/organic) or color (black/white).
The construction of doubt, uncertainty, or outright failure is omnipresent in Kasper’s work. Total Revolution is both a critical outcry that questions the simplified social discourse, and a personal reminder to everyone about how easy it is to pass judgment and reach hastened conclusions.

Sonne’s visual language and choice of materials refer to European modernism and American minimalism. The industrial produced materials and geometric shapes are juxtaposed by organic imperfections and human traces, adding humane vulnerability to the machinelike works.

Sonne draws inspiration from philosophy, psychology, politics, religion, art history and popular culture.

Kasper Sonne, born 1975, lives and works in New York. Total Revolution is Sonne’s third solo exhibition with V1 Gallery, later this year he opens a solo exhibition with LaViolaBank in New York. Spring 2010 Museo Sala Siqueiros in Mexico will exhibit a large-scale installation created for the museum.

V1 Gallery

Hi,

This is our last summer intervention.

A very crowded area at night time when the atmosphere is great… we installed 80 male urine containers, the ones used in hospitals. Inside we poured yellow water and, what else but our lights.

We hope you will like it.

Luzinterruptus

Michael Janssen

Tom Burr’s first show at Bortolami Gallery, opening on September 10th, is also his first gallery exhibition in the United States in six years.

Things have changed greatly since Tom’s last commercial show in his native New York. A new generation of artists emerged to advance and challenge traditional ideas in art. Among these is a notable group that is mining the history of Post-Minimalism and Post-Modernism. It is important to recall that these artists are picking up on a thread that began a generation or two before them.

Tom Burr entered the picture then, back in the early 1990s when he started showing at Colin DeLand’s American Fine Arts in SoHo. AFA had already presented the fences and aluminum panels of Cady Noland and the domestic-object based installations of Jessica Stockholder; across the street and around the corner, Felix Gonzalez-Torres put out strings of light and Jack Pierson hung tinsel. Within this context, Burr was an important new voice in the dialogue of institutional critique, exploring the politics of minimalism and politics at large that were at the forefront of artistic and social concerns-notably identity, society and the body, often dealing with issues of sexuality, war and the structures of public and private spheres.

One distinction of Burr’s work that persists is his consideration of the ephemeral. This interest extends beyond time to all sensory experiences, which must be transitory by nature. He describes individual sculptures as ‘moments’ and thinks of their varied qualities in terms of musical notes, temperatures, and moods-qualities that cannot be trapped into the permanency of an object, but may be somehow suggested.

Movies and sitcoms, like Men in Black and Bewitched, acknowledge the crux of the ephemeral by giving protagonists the unearthly power of being able to snare those moments. They stop time with a click, a twitch or a wiggle. Burr positions himself as this hero and casts the viewer as his sidekick. We walk into a room full of scattered objects, many of which appear to have been suddenly abandoned. It feels almost-familiar; you are in your neighbor’s bedroom, perhaps. The scale is human and humane and even in his most monumental works bears a direct proportional relationship to the spectator. Materials have a latent potential-the hinged figure could collapse flat, the shirt could fall, the bare wood could be painted, varnished or otherwise concealed.

A sense of timing lingers between the objects and their ownership remains ambiguous. It might appear that there is a story or scene involved-and in fact there may be. Or not. Officially, no specific narrative is ever revealed by the artist, no interpretation or assignation ever described as blatantly ‘wrong.’ The shirt or pants may have belonged to the artist, or his lover, or his father. The portraits may be devotionals culled from a fan’s stash of memorabilia-to Jim Morrison, Brad Davis, John Cage, Kate Bush, etc. Or they may be surrogates, stand-ins meant to represent elements of the artist himself, discrete clues about the artist’s own biography or experience.

The use of language enhances this ambiguity. Titles for works and for exhibitions are deliberately elusive, typically bearing many meanings and leaving the visitor to speculate which-if any-bear real significance. Sentence, sliver, silver, and so forth.

Tom Burr’s work may currently be seen in a two-person exhibition (with Monica Bonvicini) at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; as a part of ‘Rachel Harrison: Consider the Lobster and other Stories’ at the Hessl Museum at Bard College; in ‘The World is Yours’, curated by Anders Kold at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark; ‘Moby Dick’, curated by Jens Hoffman, at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (opening late September) and in the exhibition ‘Saints and Sinners,’ curated by Laura Hoptman, at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. He will have a solo show at the FRAC Champagne Ardenne in the Spring of 2010. He is presently a visiting critic at Yale School of Art, Graduate Program in Sculpture. His work is included in prestigious public and private collections around the world.

Bortolami Gallery/a>

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: “ANDY CAPP VARIATIONS”

28.08.-26.09.2009 / : FRIDAY 28.08.2009 / 19.00-21.00

STANDARD (OSLO) is pleased to present “Andy Capp Variations”, an exhibition of new works by Torbjørn Rødland. For his second solo exhibition in the gallery, Rødland employs the comic strip character of Andy Capp as the starting point for a series of 12 small-scale black and white photographs. Repeating the same drawn image of this character, these photographs seem motivated by an interest in nivellation; an attempt at having the photographs neither appear as portrait, nor landscape, nor still life.

“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes”. The claim made by writer Ralph Waldo Emerson would not automatically extend to serve as a description of the comic strip character Andy Capp. However, ‘common sense’ and ‘working clothes’ – strictly speaking being two out of three – would at least make a decent score. Torbjørn Rødland’s recent body of works centres around a trademark portrait of this British comic strip character (whose strip has been running in daily newspapers since the late 1950s). Here the working class figure is rendered with his iconic pose: cap tipped down and cigarette dangling from his lips. Rødland located this drawing printed onto a souvenir mirror. The mirror was then applied to make a rhythmic reappearance of the same motif, but also to serve as a tool to tweak the logic of photographic flatness and pictorial space. Throughout these twelve photographs Rødland seeks to obscure the relationship between foreground and background, while never extending this play beyond the limits of analogue photographic techniques.

“Andy Capp Variations” could both be seen as a hard return to repetition and as an attempt to dissolve the classical genres that Rødland has been preoccupied with in recent years: the still life, the portrait and the landscape photography. These recent photographs apparently relish the arbitrary combination of elements from all the above genres. In isolating this pleasure from reason, Rødland would claim, these photographs are ‘perverted’: “Perverted photography doesn’t sell a product or communicate a message. It’s not meant to be decoded, but to keep you in the process of looking. It’s layered and complex. It mirrors and triggers you without end and for no good reason, and that is erotic”. Thus these photographs take an obvious interest in a limited play: the staccato insistence on the same image on the one hand and the continuous and restless re-contextualizing of the very same image on the other.

The choice of Andy Capp as the centre of this play could partly be explained by an interest in Andy Capp as a representation of the ‘common man’ or the comic strip as a representation of ‘common sense’. Being about the people and for the people it does not rely on any education or esoteric knowledge. In fact the continuous juxtaposition of “the people” with “the elites” seems essential to the plot, not only proving a certain populist sentiment but occasionally also proving itself as a convenient and commonly accessible illustration for political parties, which at some point had former chairman of the Norweigan neo-liberal Progress Party, Carl I. Hagen, claiming that Andy Capp represented the party’s ideal supporter.

Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970) has exhibited extensively in Europe at venues such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the 48th Venice Biennale, Venice; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Air de Paris, Paris; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles; Sørlandets Art Museum, Kristiansand, and Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels. Recent group exhibitions includ Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; and Malmö Art Museum, Malmö.

Standard Oslo

Søren Behncke aka Papfar (Cardboarddad): E45 – Road Art

Charlotte Fogh Contemporary has the great pleasure to present Søren Behnckes second soloexhibition at the gallery, “E45 – Road Art”.

The exhibition features new Road Art-artworks from the artist, which relate his early straight and humorous style to his characteristic figurative and linguistic elements in a more expressive and modern look.

The exhibition E45 shows Søren Behnckes’ trip down the motorway E45 from Sweden and through Europe. The result is a Road Art-exhibition, where drawings, paintings and sculptures represent an artistic and visual diary of the trip.

Charlotte Fogh Contemporary