Month: August 2008

Unreal reality?
Reality has turned out to be something relative. We see reality TV, documentary films and photos from the world’s trouble spots, aware that the reality presented to us in these media may not be the truth or give adequate information.

Artists’ examination of reality
Reality may be turned and twisted, and its reproduction depends on the angling of the story, who tells it, what is given first priority and what is left out. This concept of reality as relative or as a construction has interested pictorial artists for a long time. The exhibition will show works investigating reality and the conditions determining our concept of reality – works which may even change or colour the way we experience reality.

Everything from painting to video
The works in the exhibition are executed in the materials used in today’s pictorial art, ranging from painting and sculpture to installation, photography and video – combined in every possible way. The public will be shown exact copies of existing rooms, candid self portraits, installations which make one doubt what is up and down in the world, strange retellings of everyday stories, harsh documentarism and much, much more.

SMK

Andreas Vesterlund’s artwork focuses on borders and limits, areas where something gradually or suddenly turns into something else. This includes spaces between physical places as well as less tangible borderlines, such as the space between life and death or gaps between different ways of perceiving the world.
Vesterlund graduated from The School of Photography at Gothenburg University in the spring of 2008, with a Master’s degree in Fine Arts. Before that, he attended Gothenburg Art College. He works in various media, such as photography, painting, sculpture and installation.

Signe Vad
Galleri Signe Vad



Javier Peres is pleased to announce the limited release of GREEK DADDY, a tribute to all things Greek, past, present and future.

GREEK DADDY includes in-depth coverage of 2007’s Peres Projects, Athens, the mysterious events surrounding 07-07-07, and more…

GREEK DADDY is available for purchase now from Printed Matter, Inc. (New York), Peres Projects, Berlin Los Angeles.

Your favorite regular DADDY vendor may also carry this special off-calendar issue, subject to local customs and content restrictions.

Daddy The Magazine
Peres Projects

DUNK! / TOTES MEER
A solo exhibition by Dan Miller (U.K.)

DUNK! is back from holidays in the sun.
DUNK! is proud to present the exhibition Totes Meer.
TOTES MEER is a journey into fields of appropriated imagery and objects.
TOTES MEER is supreme poetical and cool elaborations in sculpture, paintings & drawings.
TOTES MEER is Dan Millers first solo show in Denmark.

DAN MILLER Graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2002 and has since shown widely in both the U.K and Europe.
Through drawing, painting and sculpture Miller discusses ideas of reproductive process and failure, drawing from a range of appropriated imagery and objects. Historical fascination and rigorous process underpin an investigation into the underlying surface tensions of material.
Adopting a detailed mechanical approach, two-dimensional works are interceded with a variety of collaged references questioning appropriation and authorship. These assemblages are continuously re-configured, blurring the line between original and facsimile. Floating without anchor, they mimic mythical figures and intangible monuments.

Dunk

Mon 7 Apr 2008 10:25:50 +0200
Curator: Dear Shane and Thomas,
I’m really looking forward to your exhibition here in August. Your opening is set for the 15 of August. I will leave it up to you to decide on how you want to split/ co-operate the show, but would be happy to help out, play a long in any way you want me to.

On 08/04/2008 at 12.32, Shane Bradford wrote
Shane: To me it’s sounds like a good old fashioned UPROCK! Have you come across this expression before? It’s an 80’s thing…when two rivals met in the street instead of fighting they would have a spontaneous uprock, in other words a break-dance competition. I’m not suggesting we do that! But maybe take the idea and transfer it – I propose that I will send you an image of a piece of work of mine so that you can respond to it with one of your own that will match or better it. Then you send me one of yours and I will respond etc…until the show is full. And we call the show UPROCK….

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:43:42 +0200
Thomas: Hey Jerkface
The first publication of our show holds the title…..
DADADADAAAA

Uprock

V1 Gallery presents
UPROCK

Opening day: Friday August 15 2008. From 17.00-22.00
Exhibition period: August 15 2008 –September 06 2008

V1 Gallery proudly presents Uprock, an exhibition duelled by Shane Bradford (UK) and Thomas Øvlisen (DK).

Shane Bradford from London is best known for his ’drip works’, that have made several art critics and collectors look for big superlatives. He dips various objects (latest chicken skeletons, fashion magazines and tricycles among others) in multicoloured emulsions – a process that can take up to a year – until they look like amorphous abnormalities. But his humoristic wanderlust and socio political eye for the ironic paradoxes in modern society also extends to media such as film and large scale installations. He has exhibited all over Europe, and in 2007 he won the distinguished Celeste Art Prize.

Thomas Øvlisen is a well known name on the Danish art scene. His abstract play with material, shape and motif is submerged in absurd humour and a consistent fascination with the toll of the time. Where Shane Bradford constructs his works and covers them in gloss Thomas erodes and deconstructs his in a process that reminds the viewer of the relentless effect time has on earthly objects (including human beings) as he simultaneously comments on the industrial evolution of the past century.

The differences and similarities between the two artists have created a horn of plenty of thoughts, ideas and materials. And in the middle of all the confusion something suddenly makes sense. Or in the words of two artists:

Sat, 3 May 2008 09:11:53 +0200
Thomas: First of all I think one of the problems with being an artist is that one spends too much time working alone in ones studio thinking about the work being done – and subsequently I am always scared that my thoughts are hermit-like exaggerations and the work itself only actually represents half of what I claim it does. I read more stuff into my work than anybody could possible ever extract through any and all forms of analysis.

On 08/05/2008, at 10.49, Shane Bradford wrote:
Shane: I’m not sure I have anything of worth to add to what you have written. I admire your bravery at not putting a filter on what you say, you are right of course. Perhaps it’s a nice tidy summary of this show; to say that your unguarded approach, mirrored in your practice by the use of erosion as a metaphor for getting under the skin of societies polished surface constructs (deep breath) sits well in opposition to my recoating process, putting a gloss on a dysfunctional illusion that we call civilisation. (Or maybe this neat conclusion is exemplary of my urge for unified finishes!) In the words of someone famous: I DON’T KNOW.

I must admit that with you taking away layers and me adding them on I can’t see how we will ever make an artwork together! Talk about Sisyphus…

V1 Gallery

Shane?s works looks very cool @ V1 Gallery::::::

Larm Galleri

Specta

For the third time MOGADISHNI has the great pleasure of presenting the British London-based artist Rebecca Stevenson (b. 1971) in the gallery where she will be exhibiting new works for the solo exhibition “Tempting Nature”.

Served up like dishes at a bizarre, rococo banquet, the work lures the eye and the senses. A candy-pink swan is all done up like a fantastic cake, sticky cherries tumbling from fine layers of flesh and feathers. A cute baby bear, straight out of a Disney movie, looks like he’s smiling up at the viewer, whilst the skin of his back unfurls to reveal peaches, berries and butterscotch flowers. Sugary surfaces look positively lickable, chocolate-coloured roses good enough to eat. Excessive and outrageous, sweet to the point of being toxic, the works seem to tempt the viewer to the visual consumption of something that is both pleasurable and poisonous.

In “Tempting Nature”, a selection of animals have been meticulously prepared for the delectation of the viewer. Exquisitely crafted, at once charming and disturbing, the material of each sculpted creature is teased open creating lush, coloured wounds and cavities, which are in turn stuck with exotic flora and stuffed with succulent fruit. The perversity of this process, like the twofold nature of the work, is reflected by the show’s ambiguous title.

To tempt can mean to allure or entice, but also to provoke, as in the English expression “Tempting Fate”. Read this way, “tempting nature” suggests a risky undertaking on behalf of the artist, an absurd intent to imitate or improve upon nature. Stevenson’s work recalls forms and practices which use painstaking processes to mimic or refine the natural – stuffed animals, wax flowers, botanical illustrations, still life, genetic modification – forms that, whether employed in the name of art or science, reveal an obsession with pinning things down, like a row of butterflies in a frame.

Unlike the dead hares and game birds routinely draped across still life paintings, Stevenson’s animals are resolutely animate, even perky. The disjunction between this and their wounded, unravelled state is disconcerting. Whilst referring to scientific representations of the natural world, these works eschew taxonomy, and elude description or containment. Hybrid and chimerical in nature, they embody a specific otherness that relates to the ungovernable processes of nature itself: growth, replication, transformation.

Mogadishni