Month: September 2008

JOHAN NOBELL


JOHAN NOBELL
Battlefields

Bendixen contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Battlefields by the
Swedish artist Johan Nobell.
There are a lot of ways to depict the landscape; you can faithfully reproduce what you see with
photographic accuracy. You can also, like the impressionist did, transfer the impression nature makes on to the canvas or you can, like Johan Nobell does, create a fictitious and imaginative landscape and let these sceneries operate as metaphor for the civilization general condition.
Johan Nobell is considered to be one of Scandinavia’s most original painters, who convincingly have defended the genre of landscape painting in contemporary art history. Though Johan Nobell’s
paintings continues to challenge the traditional landscape genre he always maintain it narrative
tradition.

At the exhibition Battlefields, Johan Nobell demonstrates how well he masters to organize and control chaos of surreal, vivid forms. In a unique way Nobell illustrates, that it is in the space between the serious and playful, between the detail and a unified whole……that it’s simply in a controlled chaos that we find the greatest questions and answers.

Johan Nobell’s apocalyptic scenes are neither wholly abstract nor figurative, neither reality nor fantasy, but it’s exactly a surreal space where each attempt to grasp the slowly emerging narrative proves futile. The many details in the paintings acts as guerilla-troupes who provokes an ethical, political or universal riot within our (sub-) consciousness. Though the titles and landscapes often devoid of human presence – but with human like sceneries – Johan Nobell illustrates how he acknowledge and interpret human relations to nature in a contemporary society where natural and man-made worlds collide.

Johan Nobell (b.1963) graduated from Valand, Gothenburg University College of Art. His cooperated
with Kim Bendixen goes a long way back and his art has been exhibited all around the
world. Johan Nobell has have several solo-exhibitions in Los Angeles (Sandroni Rey), New York
(Pierogi 2000) Mexico City (Galeria OMR), and Stockholm (Andréhn-Schiptjenko).

Bendixen Art

MAND III – Asyl i Jylland


MAND III – Asyl i Jylland (Refuge in Jutland)
Rasmus Danø, Kristian Devantier, Jeroen Kooijmans (NL), Henrik Leach, Rasmus Lütken

Charlotte Fogh Contemporary is proud to present the exhibition MAN III – Refuge in Jutland. MAN consists of the four Danish artists Rasmus Danø, Kristian Devantier, Henrik Leach and Rasmus Lütken. For the exhibition at Charlotte Fogh Contemporary the group has invited the internationally acclaimed video artist Jeroen Kooijmans, who will be showing one of his poetic audiovisual pieces.

With the artists’ gender and individual artworks as starting points, MAN III – Refuge in Jutland will use great humour and self-knowledge to “attack” the term “MAN” and the expectations and prejudices that confront men today.

Charlotte Fogh

Elmgreen & Dragset: Too Late


Victoria Miro announces Elmgreen & Dragset’s first solo show in the gallery and a new production of their acclaimed play Drama Queens which will be performed for one night only on Sunday 12 October at London’s Old Vic Theatre.

Too Late features a re-staging of the entire Victoria Miro space. Visitors will be met by a total transformation of the gallery’s interior architecture via several new interconnecting large-scale installations by Elmgreen & Dragset. Through mid November, Victoria Miro Gallery will appear as ‘The Mirror’ – described by the artists as “a party that’s already over: lights are still blinking and the disco ball sadly spinning, but there’s no-one on the dance floor, and the last round has been served long ago.”

In a world where social and sexual relationships are now invariably created in isolation from real space and time, Too Late reflects on the loss of common social ground. As conditions for social engagement become increasingly frustrated by control mechanisms – such as licensing and smoking laws, stringent surveillance and economic exclusion – and personal interaction thwarted by alternative platforms such as Myspace, Facebook and Gaydar, the artists stage a momentary reversal of the gentrification process and a disruption of socially sanctioned ways of behaviour.
Throughout their career, Elmgreen & Dragset have investigated modes in which art is presented and perceived. In their socially engaged installations, objects and performances, the artists reconfigure the familiar with characteristic wit and subversive humour.  From the transformation of New York City’s Bohen Foundation into a fictional 13th Street Subway Station in 2004, to the siting of a Prada boutique in the middle the Texan desert in 2005, to their critically acclaimed The Welfare Show in 2006 at Serpentine Gallery, Elmgreen & Dragset’s work raises issues around how designs and spaces influence and reflect social conventions and behavioural patterns. Wryly entertaining, their work puts an amusing spin on serious cultural concerns.

Drama Queens
Gala in Aid of the Old Vic Theatre Trust, Sunday 12 October
The Old Vic Theatre is to collaborate with Elmgreen & Dragset to stage a new production of their acclaimed work Drama Queens on Sunday 12 October. Drama Queens features six famous sculptures as its protagonists, including Jeff Koons’ Rabbit and Giacometti’s Walking Man. A specially cast group of actors, including Old Vic Artistic Director Kevin Spacey, will voice the sculptures, which will be performed live for the first time.  
The evening is produced by The Old Vic with support from Victoria Miro in aid of The Old Vic Theatre Trust’s Creative Development Programme.

Notes to Editors
Based in Berlin, Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Norway) have worked as a collaborative team since the mid-1990s. The artists have recently been awarded an unprecedented two pavilions – the Nordic and the Danish – for the 2009 Venice Biennale. Following an international competition in 2006, their proposal for the first national memorial for the homosexual victims of the Nazi regime was accepted, and later opened in May 2008.
Elmgreen & Dragset have exhibited extensively, including This is the First Day of My Life, Malmö Konsthall (2007), The Welfare Show, Serpentine Gallery (2006), MCA Chicago (2005), Tate Modern (2004), Louisiana Museum (2004), Kunsthalle Zurich (2001), Moderna Museet (2000) and Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998). The artists have also participated in numerous biennials such as the first edition of the Berlin Biennial in 1998 and the Venice, Istanbul, Gwangju and Sao Paolo biennials. They are currently featured in the U-Turn Copenhagen Quadriennial and Yokohama Triennial. In 2003 Elmgreen & Dragset won the prestigious Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.

Victoria Miro

Tor-Magnus Lundeby


What happens when a wide array of media, including electronic music, science fiction, computer games, comic book characters, astronomic pictures and charts are all sampled in oil paintings and sculptures? This is what the Norwegian artist Tor-Magnus Lundeby will explore through the exhibition “Cityscape Colour Anarchy (Prospect Disorder II)” at MOGADISHNI. The gallery proudly presents the third solo exhibition by Tor-Magnus Lundeby (b. 1966) who is born in Frederiksstad, Norway and currently lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.

From numerous households in his neighbourhood Lundeby has for a long time been collecting printing house colour codes like Tetra-Tops, the ones hidden within cartons and boxes, through which he has found his obsessive way of approaching sculpture as well as implementing an additional language to his paintings. Rather than focusing on recycling and trash, this is more an approach towards the possibilities of what people usually find useless and leave behind. Lundeby focuses on elements that people are not aware of because they are hidden and stuck in the corners of cigarette boxes and milk cartons.

Lundeby imagines these small colour squares and dots lined up on the print codes as being windows on cylindrical towers in a futuristic architectural anarchy. Through these windows his paintings become alive and through both sculptures and paintings the spectator is faced with an organic futuristic architecture, floating in a characteristically infinite monochrome universe. In Lundeby’s paintings he has moved towards an organic aspect of architecture despite his obsessiveness with order, number and structures which creates the opposite when the colour codes are taken out of their original function and sampled together.

What can however at first sight be seen as a macro image in Lundeby’s paintings can at closer inspection appear as a depiction of a micro image. The architectural plan of a massive structure can be easily misread as the detail of a very elaborate mechanical piece or an intricate abstract form, always composed by planned lines in an extraordinarily balanced composition. This playfulness with scale levels is recurrent in his work and is always opening a vast field of possible and surprising significations.

Lundeby’s art constantly alternates between music, architecture and landscape, and often with the fascination of structure and the twist of prospect. The worlds of music and music-culture take a privileged position in Lundeby’s works as general codes for personal fantasies and subversive expectations. In this context, a psychedelic lore is employed not as a retro gesture but as an artistic method for mapping the self and stimulating the experience of the now.

Lundeby is currently exhibiting at the Carnegie Art Award 2008/2009 and has during the last couple of years exhibited at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, Moderna Museet, Sweden, The Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway and Museum of Modern Art KIASMA, Finland. His works are also represented in collections at The Museum of Contemporary Art Oslo, The Swedish Art Council, Norsk Hydro and The Arts Council Norway. He graduated from Vestlandet’s Art Academy in Bergen, Norway in 1996.

Mogadishni

Mail Order Monsters


Mail Order Monsters

Jules de Balincourt, Mat Brinkman, Ry Fyan, Tomoo Gokita, Joe Grillo , Evan Gruzis, Ben Jones, Misaki Kawai, Eddie Martinez, Taylor Mckimens, Takeshi Murata, Anders Oinonen, Aurel Schmidt , Francine Spiegel, Dennis Tyfus, Jaimie Warren

Max Wigram Gallery announces a group exhibition curated by Kathy Grayson. Mail Order Monsters brings to London, for the first time, a group of young American artists.

Tapping into an underground music and graffiti vibe the selection of works in the show also finds reference in computer-programme aesthetics. Taking its title from a 1980s videogame (which allowed you to build your own monster) the show suggests an approach to the figuration in contemporary art practice which brings together fictional fantasy with the post-human figure of techno-dystopia, depicting the body as broken, decaying, uncanny and monstrous.

This exhibition was previously hosted by Peres Projects, Berlin; Deitch Projects, New York; and Andreas Melas, Athens.

Concreteandglass

Maxwigram

if you give me the mountains i will ask for the sea


if you give me the mountains i will ask for the sea

matti blind
         ingo gerken 
                   carsten gliese
                                 sofia hultén 
                                           jakob jensen 
                                                       wolfgang plöger
                                               lucy powell 
                           egill sæbjörnsson
             wolf von kries 
tilman wendland
from 26 september – 1 november 2008.
opening thursday, 25. september 2008, 5-8 pm
More at www.plgallery.dk
peter lav PHOTO GALLERY has invited one of its Danish artists, Jakob Jensen, to curate a group exhibition. The purpose of the exhibition is to introduce new foreign artists, all of whom are installation artists, to the Copenhagen art scene. Jakob Jensen’s object is to show their alternative approaches to the photographic medium.
 
The participating artists change the motif, turn it on its head, reflect it in human relations, the whole time attempting to broaden the framework for understanding, and to confuse the viewer in order to pave the way for alternative ways of understanding the surrounding world.
 
PL Gallery