Month: April 2010

Morten Skrøder Lund

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Danish artist Morten Skrøder Lund presents a brand new work titled Such a Short Memorial Form in the exhibition space Phonebox at the artist-run gallery IMO. Phonebox is located in a former phone cabin, which will serve as an intimate exhibition space with room for only one person at a time. Here the public is invited to experience the sound work Such a Short Memorial Form April 30 – May 12.

In his new work Such a Short Memorial Form created for IMO’s Phonebox, Morten Skrøder Lund works with how a space acoustically can be represented and displaced. The work unfolds both auditorily and visually by use of microphones and speakers as primary components. Sound from the gallery space outside the acoustically isolated phone cabin is captured with microphones and is heard displaced and distorted inside the phone cabin. The idea of the cabin as a sound-proof private space and the walls as stable architectural borders are challenged. The spatial displacement is further enhanced by the visual elements of the work where the magnetic field that exists around a loudspeaker is used to create a floating sculptural structure.

Morten Skrøder Lund is a young Danish artist, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen. He works in various formats such as painting and installation and often integrates sound as an active element in his works. He is active as a musician with special attention to experiments with electronic sound and phenomena such as feedback. His approach to the sonic medium is spatial and sculptural. Especially the idea of sound as a physical event is at the centre of his work where sound as a process literally sets material in motion. And through this motion creates relations between objects, materials and people.

Morten Skrøder Lund’s work is the seventh in a series of sound-based works presented in Phonebox at IMO in the first half of 2010. The series is titled Sounds Up Close #1-12 and is curated by Kristoffer Akselbo and Rune Søchting. It is the intention of the series to present a number of important artists who work with sound as a medium. The different pieces reflect a variety of approaches to the work with sound as medium. Over a period of six months a total of twelve pieces will be presented each for a fortnight. Some of the up-coming artists in Phonebox are Dani Gal (IL), Steve Roden (US) and Marc Behrens (DE).

Phonebox has earlier served as a phone cabin for the employees at Carlsberg. During the next six months the space, which is acoustically isolated, will function as a unique frame for display and reception of sound-based works. Moreover, the space itself will play an important role in the conceptions of many of the presented works.

IMO

Luke Rudolf

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For his first solo show Luke Rudolf has made a series of new paintings that hijack the visual language of abstraction and the figurative tradition of portraiture. What might, with proximity, appear to be a free-form composition that brings painterliness and graphic control into uneasy alliance, soon releases its figurative allusions.

On the bounds of recognition, Rudolf’s anonymous portraits require a psychological unravelling on the part of the viewer; identity emerges from broad gestural brush strokes, sporadic mark making and layered shards of geometry. The paintings demonstrate how our tendency to recognise a face is triggered no matter how clownish its contortions or artificial its construction. Combining psychotropic colour spectrums, metallic flats, drips, rasping brushstrokes and hard-edged, masked-off triangles, Rudolf knowingly employs many stylistic clichés, dislocating them from their original contexts. Each piece is an orchestrated drama, a controlled explosion that exploits the earnest daubs of the expressionist as well as the graphic immediacy of design. The paintings’ relationship to art history is consequently far from reverent, as the remit of Modernism is satirically reversed to produce a monster of addition rather than the spirit of reductivism.

Luke Rudolf born 1977 in Redhill, lives and works in London.
Recent exhibitions include The Library of Babel / In and Out of Place, 176 Project Space, London until 9 May 2010; Paintings In The Sky, Kate MacGarry and TAG, From 3 to 36: New London Painting, Brown, London, both 2009. Rudolf graduated from the MFA in Art Practice, Goldsmiths College in 2009.

Kate MacGarry

Stefan Strumbel

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Circleculture Gallery presents Stefan Strumbel’s solo show “Home Sweet Home“. With his art, Strumbel uses traditional motives that are associated with his origin, the Black Forest. On an abstract level, Strumbel deals with the paradigms of “home“ and simultaneously questions its concept. The exhibition encompasses objects from folk art that refer to the clichéd notions of home, folklore and popular piety: the traditional cuckoo clock, wooden masks of the Alemannic Carnival or typical crucifixes mainly used in catholic households.
Strumbel exaggerates these objects of popular cult and culture with elements of urban art and pop art. By doing so, he puts these objects into a new, partly provocative context. Significant elements of the cuckoo clock, such as traditionally carved ornaments, are replaced by aggressive motives that stand for violence, pornography and death. A typical carnival mask from the Black Forest region, such as the “pig mask“, bears a wooden grenade instead of the apple that would be usually expected by the audience. At first sight, these objects do not appear disturbing. The wooden carvings are excellently crafted and, with their bright and colorful surface, appear as light and shiny pieces of pop art. Strumbel, however, creates both an artificial and artistic aesthetics with his usage of extreme exaggerations in regard to form and content. His objects simultaneously provoke and attract the audience by decadence and violations of taboos.
With his art, Strumbel initiates a change in social values: Traditional ideals, clichéd notions of home and the reality of the individual are dissolved and transformed into an aesthetics that becomes an allegory of social status symbols. The artist unmasks the mechanisms of a society that is urged to the pursuit of consumerism by having surrendered to the attraction of the media. With his objects, Strumbel creates a world of illusion that reflects society’s real maladies.

Ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image

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Ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image
Ulrik Heltoft (DK), Marie Kølbæk Iversen (DK), Jacob Jessen (DK), Simon Dybbroe Møller (DK), Pamela Rosenkranz (CH) & Guy Sherwin (GB)
Curator: Internationalistisk Ideale

Opening and launch of Internationalistisk Ideale #3: April 29 2010, 5 – 9 PM


What is the function of visual art in a culture increasingly affected by an accelerated image flux? And how does the contemporary artist navigate in the expansive image culture without contributing to the overstimulation and the exhaustion?
These are some of the questions posed in the exhibition Ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image, which is curated by Danish art journal Internationalistisk Ideale. In conjunction with the opening, Internationalistisk Ideale will be launching its third issue entitled The Aesthetic Turn. For the exhibition the editors, Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Camma Juel Jepsen and Louise Hold Sidenius, have chosen a line of artists, who pay particular attention to and thematize the medium and the materials with which they work – in the gleam of their actualness.
“Instead of just ”being”, everyday consumer goods now insist on serving as socio-cultural signifiers in a self-orchestration of the individual’s life. The arts has the possibility of placing its focus elsewhere: where the stroke is nothing but a line, and the image is a picture of itself: an image of an image.”
The title of the exhibition, Ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image, is a quote by French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard, which in English translates to ”This is not a just image, it is just an image.”
On May 30 2010 at 3 PM, Internationalistisk Ideale hosts a combined book release and talk featuring Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Ferdinand Ahm Krag, and Lars Bang Larsen.

IMO

Transfer Function @ ZieherSmith

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The transfer function reveals how the circuit modifies the input amplitude in creating the output amplitude.

Transfer Function features four artists merging and manipulating – physically and visually – their mediums including photography, painting, printmaking, textiles, ceramics, and sculpture – creating their own unique hybrids. The results are often imbued with further juxtapositions such as the personal with the abstract and the mass produced material or image with the handmade.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s ceramics, photographs, prints, found objects and sculptures are inextricably linked to each other and defy their limits. For example, the woodblock that begot a series of monoprints was also a major sculpture in her recent solo exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery, New York, after having served many years as her family table. Her off-kilter, bulbous ceramics often occupy household furniture, thereby transforming the two into a new sculptural being. The artist was recently lauded in press including The New York Times and New York Magazine for her contribution to the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

Sam Moyer’s sculptures carry conceptual heft balanced by their history as commonplace materials transformed by both art and crafting processes. Incorporating photography and painting into her sculptural practice, the artist creates objects that somehow seem both handmade and prefab. Her work was seen in 2009 group shows at the St. Louis Contemporary Museum and P.S.1 Contemporary and will be in P.S.1’s 2010 Greater New York. Her recent solo exhibition at Rachel Uffner Gallery was noted by The New Yorker and Time Out New York.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty works with found imagery, printing portraits in CMYK ink on a desktop printer. She then manually reworks the prints by digital manipulation before finally reproducing them as exposed photographs. The visceral results merge the aesthetics of photography, collage, watercolor, and even body art and embody a wide emotional range from humor and melancholy to disgust. She has presented solo projects in New York at Rachel Uffner Gallery, The Kitchen, and P.S.1 Contemporary.

Mariah Roberston’s unique photographs are the result of darkroom experimentation and celebrate the element of chance. The resulting images are a vigorous mix of representation and abstraction. “The outcome doesn’t matter as much as the inquiry; this isn’t abstraction it’s exploration,” (Mariah Robertson, 2009). Her work has been seen in New York at a recent group show at Sikkema Jenkins as well as solo shows at Museum 52 and Guild & Greyshkul. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

ZieherSmith

Sam Moyer