Month: August 2009

Jake & Dinos Chapman

In conversation: Andrew Bick & Alicia Paz, Sat 5 Sept, 3.00pm, the Bluecoat, Liverpool.
Artists Andrew Bick and Alicia Paz talk to Sara-Jayne Parsons, Exhibition Curator at the Bluecoat, about their work and participation in Slow Magic.

Featuring the work of six international artists, Slow Magic examines different approaches to contemporary painting in playful and enchanting ways. For some artists the excitement of working with paint is found in their brushstrokes, daubs, drips and smears. Applying paint in a very vigorous way often results in an expressive surface that is lively and sensuous.

The decisions made by some artists are revealed through contrasting surfaces and colours. They often concern themselves with the physical qualities of paint ahead of a need to create realistic or representational images. These abstract paintings tell stories through layers.

Other artists make paintings using marker pen, Perspex, wax, smoke or collage materials, and sometimes cut through their canvases to create visual tricks. The illusions they create make us wonder, are we looking at something real or imagined? Is a painting flat or three-dimensional? The selection of works included in the exhibition highlights that much like a conjuror; it is the artist’s sleight of hand that makes painting magical.

Hales Gallery

Johan Thurfjell
Conclusion

Galerie Nordenhake is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition in Stockholm with Johan Thurfjell.

Thurfjell continues to source personal and sometimes private experiences in order to create works that resonate on a universal level. He avoids sentimentality despite the often poetic and personal characteristics of his material.

In his exhibition Conclusion, Thurfjell presents two sculptures and a series of watercolours that communicate a sense of loss, nostalgia and possibly tragedy. Through a process of miniaturizing “big” and sometimes traumatic subjects Thurfjell renders them manageable both to himself and his audience.

Collapse is an imposing sculpture depicting a multi-tower turn-of-the-century iron bridge in a state of destruction. The failing structure is fictional but inspired by a bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2005. The physical, visible catastrophe of the bridge becomes a cathartic embodiment of a psychological state.

A steel sculpture of an old American billboard, scaled down to human height, is presented in the work Conclusion. The surfaces of the signs show a patina suggesting years of use, weather and finally, neglect. The remaining traces point to an earlier epoch and evoke a tainted nostalgia. The communicative power of the billboard has defaulted instead into an archeology.

The sense of loss and personal history in the exhibition crystallizes in Ghosts, a series of faint geometric watercolors in old frames. The paintings function as simple monochrome abstractions but allude to removed old photographic portraits. The faded traces of the missing photographs invoke those once depicted and now absent.

Johan Thurfjell was born in 1970 in Solna. He currently lives and works in Stockholm. His most recent solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake was titled “Dead Calm,” and held in 2008. Other solo exhibitions include “Jim’s Room,” Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall (2007), Färgfabriken in Stockholm (2004) and Index in Stockholm (2001). His group exhibitions include the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork (2007), Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm (2007), 21c Museum in Louisville (2006), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2006), Signal Malmö (2005), the Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art Momentum in Moss, Norway (2004), Norrköpings Konstmuseum (2003) and Dunkers Kulturhus in Helsingborg. In June 2008 he was honored with an award from the Marianne and Sigvard Bernadottes Artist Fund.

Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm

BLACK & WHITE GALLERY is proud to present CHAOSMOSIS by the Danish artist Jonas Pihl.

CHAOSMOSIS has been borrowed by Jonas Pihl from a Deleuze’s term ‘chaosmos’ as the title for his first solo exhibition in the United States. It represents complexity of the themes and formal issues he investigates and reveals the artist’s ceaseless scrutiny of the spectrum of paradoxes to be found when random transforms into pre-determined and chaos amalgamates with cosmos.

In his native Denmark, Jonas Pihl is best known for extensive groups of works in which he connects the formal and the conceptual aspects of painting. The starting point for Pihl is paint itself. He investigates qualities and meanings of paint in its fluid and frozen states as revealed through reconstructed shapes of random splashes. Both three dimensional and painted still, his works combine moments of sync and resolution with unsettling agitations in the recorded form. Turbulent visual planes provoke barriers and gaps in the viewing experience.

Since 2005, the Copenhagen-based artist has been developing a new series of three dimensional works. He uses various shapes of random paint splashes to create stylized plastic shapes resembling the original splashes. Absurd scenarios are then painted on the three dimensional shapes to further reinforce the optical illusion of the perspective. In his choice of the bizarre figures and forms, the artist draws upon and transforms sci-fi motifs and themes from popular culture. These new works are being shown for the first time in CHAOSMOSIS. Installed on wall paintings serving as a stage-like backdrop, the new presentation simultaniously emphasizes and defies the trompe l´oeil perspective of this optically illusional environment and morphs into a psychologically charged spatial installation – a monumental single piece.

Jonas Pihl was born in 1978 and currently lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2008 he graduated from the prestigious Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Pihl has participated in multiple international group exhibitions and had several solo exhibitions in Denmark. Several of his works can be found in public collections of Nykredit, Købstædernes Forsikring and Pension Danmark.

Black & White Gallery

The Dark Roses
Toys Crew
Dozo
I Love Graffiti
Sketch

Kulturevolution

A new nice wall.

Ghost fra New York & Sabe made a very nice train….

gaard – Ontemporary rt

With the exhibition Ontemporary rt, Galleri Christoffer Egelund is proud to present Morten Steen Hebsgaard’s first major solo exhibition in the gallery. The title is inspired by the copycat industry, where, for instance, a mediocre watch maker will transcribe a brand like Rolex into Olex. Ontemporary rt thus refers to the conflict between original and copy.

For this exhibition, Morten Steen Hebsgaard has formulated a set of dogma rules: 1) all materials must be bought from IKEA, and 2) the works must copy art history. This has enabled Hebsgaard to select his own personal “darlings” and to reinterpret them, misunderstand them and challenge them in his own works. This has resulted in a series of exciting sculptural objects, where such artists as Kasimir Malevitj, Piet Mondrian and Andreas Slominski and others are all re-edited in a suggestive and humorous fashion. Morten Steen Hebsgaard turns things upside down, goes along with and against and around his art heroes, and challenges the spectator by questioning the order of things.

The contrast between modern art and IKEA is another interesting element in his project: elitist high culture against the furniture giant’s production of cheap design for the masses. The question is what actually happens when Morten Steen Hebsgaard copies these major historical works, interprets them using cheap materials from IKEA, and creates new and unique art.

Morten Steen Hebsgaard graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007, and from 2005-2006 he attended Städelschule [under Professor Simon Starling] in Frankfurt DE, and was awarded the EXIT EXTRA prize by the Copenhagen art society Gl. Strand. His works have been exhibited at art fairs, biennials and museums in Denmark and abroad. Among his exhibitions are: solo exhibition at Vejen Art Museum and curated exhibitions at Fulgsang Museum of Art, Plan B. Bologna in Italy, add x to (n), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Hafen 2. Offenbach in Germany, Dale Biennale in Norway, Preview Berlin, Bridge NY in the US. In addition, he will exhibit at Kunstforeningen Gl. Strand next year. Morten Steen Hebsgaard is co-founder of the artist groups A Kassen and OEen Group.

Gallery Christoffer Egelund