Month: November 2009

Alexander Tovborg – Galleri Nicolai Wallner

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Alexander Tovborg

It is a great pleasure to announce that Galleri Nicolai Wallner will represent young Danish artist Alexander Tovborg (b. 1983). Alexander Tovborg has studied at Staatliche Akademie der Bilden Künste in Karlsruhe and is currently a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from which he will take his degree in the Spring of 2010.

Tovborg explores different genres of art including painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. He creates compelling figurative and metaphysical imagery that seems to be drawn from his own internal imaginations as well as combined with elements from Western visuality and foreign cultures and religions. Tovborg seems to find a sincere and genuine expression in religious and spiritual art that he transforms into paintings and sculptures – creating his own myths in the process.  His work presents a series of figures that act almost as arch types summoned from the interplay between collective unconscious and individual imagination. Religion or perhaps more precise spirituality plays an important role in the imagining of his works and it is obvious that the search for inner enlightenment is pivotal for Tovborg.

Not afraid of depicting the humble or the elevated, Tovborg examines man’s eternal relation to both the mundane and the spiritual. In his most recent works he has also begun to incorporate different elements of popular culture in particular music. It seems like Tovborg has found a new source of energy in the glossy products of the contemporary music industry comparative to that of spirituality and religion.

Tovborg’s work is marked by a unique vision and a rarely seen sincerity – we look forward to present his first solo exhibition in the gallery Autumn 2010. For more information please contact the gallery.

Nicolai Wallner

Alexander Tovborg

!ND!V!DUALS

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NEW YORK, NY – Coleman Burke Gallery is pleased to present “The Outside of Inside”, the New York debut exhibition of !ND!V!DUALS, the highly acclaimed artist collective comprised of cryptozoologists and dumpster-divers extraordinaire Luke O’Sullivan, Colin Driesch, Meers and Dom Casserly.  These artists play dual roles as both skilled artisans and mad doctors as they transmute found and recycled materials into surprisingly inventive anthropomorphic creatures.

“The Outside of Inside” is an installation featuring several large-scale and small-scale sculptures of animal hybrids, who much like their creators, vary in moments of antic disposition, excitement and complicity.  To create a context for the sculptures’ anthropomorphic hijinks, landscape paintings in ornate frames occupy the walls with graphic paint-pen drawings of animals added to them, serving as a home and peripheral extension to the transgenic species beside them.

“The narrative is fairly open, it’s about living with these things, being transported into their world, even if just for a second.” – Luke O’Sullivan

Inspired by biological mutations as well as the mutations that are often exhibited by their favorite superheroes, !ND!V!DUALS’ installation pieces present a humorous but poetically lucid, ethical critique of genetically modified organisms and where this practice might lead. The playfully anti-social nature of the characters in their tableaus, while loveable in one sense, is also meant as a warning about the possible outcomes of fooling with mother nature. Like the products of genetic engineering, these characters, birthed by human imagination and ingenuity, could just as easily turn on us.

Its very difficult to reach a creative consensus in collaborative groups, something must be accepted rather than wanted…not with !ND!V!DUALS!  A more Darwinian method is utilized, where one must coerce the other in uncompromised submission.

“The only creative arguments that come up are solved by Greco-Roman wrestling. We fight each other, in the studio, on the spot. The winner makes the decision. The loser lives with it and we go on. Simple. Boom.” – Dom Casserly

Individuals got its start when Dom Casserly and Meers, who grew up together in Holliston, Massachusetts, met Colin Driesch as first-year students at The Massachusetts College of Art, in 2002. Joined a year later by Luke O’Sullivan, who was studying at the Art Institute of Boston, their first joint project was a triple bunk-bed nicknamed Death Trap 2000.

Coleman Burke Gallery (formerly RedFlagg) features both emerging and established artists working in a variety of mediums and practices. Coleman Burke Gallery is affiliated with Coleman Burke Gallery Brunswick, a site-specific project space in Brunswick, Maine, as well as Coleman Burke Gallery Portland, a storefront installation space at Port City Music Hall in Portland, Maine.

Coleman Burke Gallery

FLY BY’S

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Galleri Christoffer Egelund is proud to present the group exhibition Fly By’s. The exhibition was curated in cooperation with Anders Brinch and Morten Steen Hebsgaard and presents an international line-up of nine progressive artists, who all individually reflect the contemporary art scene of today. Consequently, visitors can see new works by: Sören Hüttel (DK), Ghost of a Dream (US), Gudrun Hasle (DK), Andreas Schulenburg (DE/DK), Helgi Thorsson (IS), Tom Fruin (US), Mats Adelman (SE), Jesper Dalgaard (DK) and Matt Franks (UK). Each of these nine artists incorporate their own unique style into sculptural, light or wall works. They come together from different parts of the world and converge in the same space, ready for a Fly By at Galleri Christoffer Egelund, where they will have room for everything from quiet passages to wilder excesses.

Sören Hüttel (DK) graduated from Funen Art Academy and Glasgow School of Art. He has exhibited in, amongst other places, Latvia, China, Scotland, the US and most recently at Gentofte Library’s Trane exhibition with ”Disco Volante”. Ghost of a Dream consists of the artist couple Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was (MFA Painting with Honors and MFA Sculpture with Honors, respectively, from Rhode Island School of Design). They have recently participated in the Young Masters exhibition in London, VOLTA 5 Artist Project in Basel, and Talent Preview ’09 at White Box Gallery in New York. Gudrun Hasle (DK), who graduated from Funen Art Academy and the Royal Danish Academy of Art, has presented solo exhibitions at, for instance, Funen Art Museum and, in the US, West Chicago City Museum. Andreas Schulenburg (DK/DE), who graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Art, has exhibited at, for instance, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art and Malmö Kunsthal and is represented at ARoS Art Museum, the New Carlsberg Foundation and the US Penny McCall Foundation and others. Helgi Thorsson (IS) is an MA in Fine Art from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam with solo exhibitions at, for instance, Fries Museum (Holland), and most recently he participated in ’Momentum Festival – 5th Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art’ in Norway. Tom Fruin (US), who graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, has exhibited at such museums as Haifa Museum (Israel), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver, Colorado), Austin Museum of Art (Austin, Texas), and Museum fur Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt. Moreover, he is represented in several collections. Mats Adelman (SE), who graduated from Malmö Art Academy, is represented in the permanent collections of Malmö Art Museum and Lund Art Museum, amongst others. Jesper Dalgaard (DK), who graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Art, has exhibited at Aarhus Art Museum, Skive Art Museum and the National Gallery of Denmark, amongst others, and has received the biennial scholarship of Statens Kunstfond (Denmark’s national art foundation). Matt Franks (UK) has an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmith College of Art in London. He has exhibited at, for instance, Birmingham Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain in London and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut, USA, and received the British Council’s Individual Artists Award in 2001.

Galleri Christoffer Egelund

SIMON FUJIWARA | THE MIRROR STAGE

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SIMON FUJIWARA | THE MIRROR STAGE



The Mirror Stage is an autobiographical play written and performed by the artist that restages his first encounter with a modern artwork, an event that ultimately led him to become an artist himself. In 1993, when he was 11 years old, the TATE St.Ives was constructed on the beach in Fujiwara’s seaside hometown, and showed the Horizontal Stripe Painting by the abstract expressionist Patrick Heron.

Within a newly designed theatre also situated on the beach – in Miami – Fujiwara’s play re-enacts multiple versions of this first encounter, and features a counterfeit reproduction of the original canvas as a backdrop. Taking us on an increasingly absurd personal journey, the play passes from the myths and cliches of artists childhoods, through the sexual psychology of abstract painters, to the history of post-war British art, all told through the memories of a repressed pubescent boy with the aid of 11 year old actor, Keanu, standing in as a double for the artist.

Simon Fujiwara was born in Girona in 1982 and currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. He studied architecture at Cambridge University and Fine Art at the Staedelschule, Frankfurt am Main. His work has recently been shown at the 53rd Venice Biennale, Temporare Kunsthalle, Berlin and the MAK Center, Los Angles. His forthcoming exhibitions include solo shows at TATE St.Ives and Julia Stoshek Collection, Dusseldorf as well as group presentations at the Baltimore Contemporary Museum, MUSAC, Leon and GAM, Turin.



Neue Alte Bruecke