Tag: 2010

Lisa Strömbeck – Martin Asbæk

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A particularly recognizable and recurring motif in Lisa Strömbeck’s art is animals – with the focus on cats and dogs, while more general thematic aspects are the feeling of loneliness, the relationship between humans and animals, and the quest for closeness and love through the existence of the pet.

The solo exhibition In Your Hands presents the staged photo series Uniform. Uniform shows various pets being cuddled by their fur-clad owner. The highly cropped composition of the photograph makes it almost impossible to know where the human being ends and the animal begins, since the fur is so like the animal’s in both colour and texture. The boundary between the intimate and the claustrophobic seems hard to detect, and this gives the works aspects of love and closeness versus brutality and tenderness. It is an old saying that a dog often looks like its owner, but in the series Uniform Strömbeck tries to show the viewer that the opposite can equally be the case.

From the photo series Uniform the viewer is guided on into the installation In Your Hands, which contains a film, a fur-upholstered easy chair and a set of paw-like fur gloves. The film make use of several close-ups that give the work an erotic character, and leave the viewer with a sense of wonder and curiosity about the kind of handling it refers to; a handling the viewers can experience on their own bodies throughout the opening on 16th April, when the two participants will be present.

Lisa Strömbeck graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1999 and lives and works in Copenhagen and in Borrby, Sweden. Earlier in the year Strömbeck participated in the group exhibition Derrida’s Katze at Kunstraum Kreutzberg in Berlin with the series Uniform. Besides the solo exhibition at the Martin Asbæk Gallery the gallery will present some of the works from the series Uniform at the art fair Art Cologne on 21st – 25th April 2010 and later at VOLTA6 in Basel on 16th – 20th June 2010.

Martin Asbæk

ADAM SAKS | DRY YOUR EYES

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Galleri Christoffer Egelund is very proud to present Adam Saks’ first solo exhibition in the gallery with the title Dry Your Eyes. The artist works with different aspects of the depth and psyche of humanity and is fond of using different image elements from high and low culture, magazines, computer drawings and old tattoo motifs. In this exhibition Adam Saks presents new paintings and watercololurs, using the human body as basis for an extended narrative.

In the exhibition Dry Your Eyes you will meet monumental human bodies where the skin with its superimposed signs and tattoos bears witness to vanity, hierarchies and aggression. Fragments of rockscapes and building structures reach across the bodies, creating a kaleidoscopic space that alternates between the tattoo signs, violent natural settings and predators wriggling and turning their way out of rock formations, threatening to break through the canvas. Adam Saks´ pictorial technique alternates between the expressive and cool calculation, sampling motifs from a distant past with such themes as loyalty, love and brutality. It is in this collage-inspired crossover field Saks creates a relevant and contemporary universe.

The title of the exhibition, Dry Your Eyes, refers to a situation with a new beginning – a kind of catharsis or purification process where the signs on the marked bodies bear witness to their past or personal history. In connection with the exhibition a catalogue with a text by art historian Tine Nygaard will be published.

Adam Saks (born 1974) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1993-99) and from Hochschule der Künste (HdK, 1996/97) in Berlin. Concurrently with Dry Your Eyes, Saks will present the solo exhibition Visual Voodoo at AROS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (23 April – 1 August 2010). Adam Saks normally lives and works in Berlin and has exhibited extensively both in Denmark and abroad. He has had solo exhibitions at, for instance, Nordiska Akvarellmuseet in Sweden, Lieu d´art Contemporain in France and South Jutland’s Art Museum, and has also been invited to join the Vilnius Painting Triennial in 2010 at the Contemporary Art Centre in Lithuania. Adam Saks is represented in the collections of Denmark’s National Gallery, KUNSTEN – Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, South Jutland’s Art Museum, Malmö Art Museum and others and received the prestigious Niels Wessel Bagge’s honorary scholarship in 2009. In addition, Saks& rsquo; books Sealevel, Kleinheinrich Verlag, with text by Kay Heymer (director of Düsseldorf Kunstmuseum), and Elephant Island, Kerber Verlag, were published in 2009.

Galleri Christoffer Egelund

DUNK! / GO WEST!

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DUNK! / GO WEST!

A group exhibition curated by DUNK!, featuring works by:

Zven Balslev, Rikke Benborg, Dorte Buchwald, Kristian Bust, Sonja Lillebæk Christensen, Rasmus Danø, Rose Eken, Michael Boelt Fischer, Thorgej Steen Hansen, Lars Heiberg, Daniel Milan, Dan Miller (uk), Andreas Poppelier (se), Hartmut Stockter (de), Louise Sparre, Jon Stahn, Jakob Rød (dk).

GO WEST! represents a magnified cross section of Copenhagen’s progressive art scene and the work will investigate a diverse range of media from painting, drawing and sculpture, through to installation video and photography.

DUNK! has given each of the artist the total freedom to decide what they would like to show at the exhibition.


DUNK

Galleri Kant

LEIGH LEDARE // TOO LATE AND LATER

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Leigh Ledare is an artist working with photography, archives, video and text. Ledare’s exhibition, Too Late and Later, centers around a unique body of work, which forms an archive of the artist’s relationship with his mother whilst creating a discursive site. As such the exhibition traces the negotiation of their respective relationships to agency, representation and authorship, alongside issues proposed by the enactment of the contents of this project in the context of the real world.

At the age of fifty, already having begun to cultivate a highly sexualized persona, Ledares mother, Tina Peterson, a former professional ballerina, approached her son to document her for posterity. The photographs exist neither as a diaristic work, nor simply as portraits of a highly sexualized persona, but as an investigation of the nature of our formation as subjects and its relation to broader shifting cultural forces. Shown in this instance alongside 3 videos, Ledare’s portraits of his mother reveal subversive responses, instances of sexuality and vulnerability tactically deployed to multiple economic, personal and psychological ends. Ledare proposes that his mother’s complex subjectivity stems not form a failure to perform a multitude of various roles, but from a simultaneous occupation of an abundance of imagined modes, rooted in the performative, that cannot be reconciled.

Leigh Ledare is born in Seattle, Washington in 1976. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 2008. A major solo exhibition of the artist’s work, Pretend You’re actually alive, was held at Les Recontres de Arles, Arles. France 2009. Ledare has also exhibits at the Swiss Institute New York (2009); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2008); and Prague Biennale (2009). Leigh Ledare lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles. He is currently Visiting Professor of Photography and Media at California Institute for the Arts.

Rod Bianco