Gert & Uwe Tobias
Enough Room To Swing A Cat
23.03 - 11.05.2019

Nils Stærk is pleased to present Enough Room To Swing A Cat, the first solo exhibition by Gert & Uwe Tobias in Scandinavia.

Large-scaled woodcuts on canvases occupy the space together with fragments of body parts, made in ceramic and installed on pedestals. The fragmented placement of a leg, a foot and a head on the floor echoes the figurative imagery shown on the walls. Scattered through space like a puzzle creating a physical demand on the viewer to move through the space in order to reconstruct a narrative. Drawing on such diverse sources as pop culture, folk art and historical movements and here mainly Surrealism, their canvases and ceramics are both playful and haunting. Despite using rather classical media, their work is highly contemporary in scale and in the way they engage one’s own sense of reality. Working like scientists, Gert & Uwe Tobias alchemically filter traditional techniques and media through a twenty-first century mindset, in constant dialogue with history across time. Based on found images, the exhibition Enough Room To Swing A Catis a contemporary matrix of figurative fragments portraying the way we freely find and apply images today. With a rich set of references, their works reflect a contemporary reality and touch upon the future of image making.

With their self-developed technique, their woodcuts on canvas consists of hundreds of layers of paint coming from small hand carved pieces of wood are placed in a geometric grid structure. Transforming both classical painting and the long tradition of woodcut, Gert & Uwe Tobias play with genres to find new ways of creating space within the surface. In their recent woodcuts on canvas,the main figure is a twisted personage caught in an endless space. This exaggerated imagery draws parallels to the central figures in Francis Bacon’s large-scale triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freudfrom1969. A similar half figurative, half abstract matrix of fantastic and jarringly animistic remnants is the foundation in Gert & Uwe Tobias’ colored woodcut on canvas.

In other works, the strong presence of history is shown through the classical composition of figurative fragments. Especially in a large, horizontal woodcut on canvas, the constructed narrative demands for a more symbolic reading; A hand seems to be moving freely through the image space next to a female personage. Reminiscing Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supperfrom around 1490s where a similar hand, detached from any of the bodies represented, is cutting through the neck of Maria Magdalene. Using a comparable format, Tobias’ monumental canvas in 200 x 300 cm are looking like our new history painting. 

Gert & Uwe Tobias (b.1973, Transylvania) are collaborators and twin brothers. Working as one brain, the left and the right side by side, handcraft is essential to their practice when working in their Bauhaus home-studio in Cologne. Since graduating from the art academy in Braunschweig in 2002, they have been seeking to redefine ways of making art. Enough Room To Swing A Cat is their first solo exhibition at Nils Stærk, at the same premiering in Scandinavia. The exhibition continues a large number of international exhibitions amongst others; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, DE; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, FR ; Gemeentemuseum of contemporary Art, Den Haag, NL; La Conservera, Ceuti/Murcia, ES; Kunstmuseum Bonn, DE; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA. Their work can be found in museum collections worldwide such as UCLA, Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand, France; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA.

Gardar Eide Einarsson
TOTAL CONTROL ZONE
10.11. - 21.12.2018

Nils Stærk is proud to present Gardar Eide Einarsson's fifth solo exhibition in the gallery. Einarsson examines the balance of power between state and individual in his current exhibition: TOTAL CONTROL ZONE - a series of new works, which relate to the way the body interfaces with the state. 

The exhibition title TOTAL CONTROL ZONE comes from the term for the strictest security level within the notorious North Korean concentration camps. The term can also draw the mind to a more general dystopic endpoint of state mass surveillance of the individual - a reality that draws closer with the advent of advanced technologies and artificial intelligence. In his current exhibition, Einarsson presents a series of new works which raise questions about how individuals relate to state control, sometimes desiring it, sometimes resisting it, sometimes falling victim to it. 

Gardar Eide Einarsson's works are direct and uncompromising in their interpretation of the social dichotomies of society. These are brought into play through two kinds of images: associative images and images that are being decontextualized and converted into paintings and installations. 

The human body is a continuous motif in the exhibition as the site where repression becomes a lived reality and is represented in a series of five new paintings with the collective title Common Errors. These paintings, based on illustrations of common errors when firing handguns from a police and military training manual in the 1960s, have been penetrated where the bullets would have entered the target, recalling the real physical violence of the bullet as well as the pierced paintings of postwar-artist Lucio Fontana.  

The anthropomorphic theme is continued in two other paintings: one based on a cartoon set in the Vietnam war depicting a caricatured fist of an officer with an outstretched index finger summoning the audience to join him in war. The second is based on a book cover of an inflammatory 1960s tome titled The Riotmakers where red splotches of paint merge with a white background cleared from information, which next to the pierced silhouettes, brings memories of abandoned human traces. 

Gardar Eide Einarsson (Born 1976, Oslo, Norway) Lives and works in Tokyo.

Einarsson is currently having solo exhibitions at Team Gallery, New York and Standard (Oslo). Previously Einarsson has been showing at several institutions all over the world, amongst others; Kunsthalle Fridericianum (solo); Kunstverein Frankfurt (solo); Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva (solo); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (solo); The Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth (solo); The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (solo); Museo Jumex, Mexico; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (solo); Bergen Kunsthall (solo); Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall; Kunsthalle Wien; National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (solo); Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow; Reykjavík Art Museum, Reykjavík (solo).

Einarsson's work is represented in numerous public collections including MoMA, New York; SFMoMA; Berkeley Art Museum; La Coleccion Jumex, Mexico; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Malmö Art Museum; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum; LACMA; MOCA, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.

Tom Sandberg
19.01. – 09.03.2019

 
We are very pleased to announce the gallery's 4th exhibition with works by Norwegian artist Tom Sandberg (1953 - 2014). Sandberg worked closely with the gallery since his first solo exhibition in 2002 until his passing in 2014. The current exhibition is made in collaboration with the Tom Sandberg Foundation and shows a selection of handmade baryta prints by Tom Sandberg. 

Tom Sandberg is known for his seductive and tactile black & white photographs. The characteristic works in rich grey tones have since the 1970s been the Norwegian artist's undoubted signature. Sandberg was a photographer and a human being in constant motion, drawn by the magic of the moment and always hunting for his next motif.  

The counterpoints in Sandberg's recurring subjects range widely. In this exhibition, Sandberg's oeuvre is presented through a thematic selection of 3 image categories: clouds, smoke and shadows. The seemingly divergent subject matter share a state of being in transit. Together they form an associative narrative - a translucence that travels through meteorological and urban scenes.

The presented works originate from Sandberg's collection of photographic baryta prints created in his personal darkroom at his house at Ekely, Oslo. In Sandberg's classical in-depth process in the darkroom, he projected light by means of an enlarger through the carefully selected film negative onto the photographic paper. During exposure, the artist meticulously calibrated the amount of light and time projected onto the image.

Sandberg's photographic practice was linked to the tradition of straight photography - this artistic approach comes through in Sandberg's clean and unmanipulated photographs where the captured moment stands without editing, revealing the artist's eye for camera angling.  

In his work, Sandberg explored the surface and depth ratio in a motif and built an often ambiguous, yet very recognisable world of images. Sandberg's photographs reveal his fascination for a complex visual reality; he consistently managed to capture cloud formations in the very moment that they would take on a different and more personal presence. Both his figurative and non-figurative works bear the same high level of intensity. Even the seemingly abstract works attracts the eye and engage our own mental images - what you see is not necessarily what you get.
 

Tom Sandberg (1953-2014) was educated at Trent Polytechnic in England where the American photographers and artists Thomas Joshua Cooper and Minor White were among his teachers. For more than 30 years Sandberg photographed, and simultaneously lay the foundation for the professional photo environment that Norway is known for today. Tom Sandberg has exhibited at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Lillehammer Kunstmuseum, and Fondazione Fotografia Modena in Italy and his international recognition had its peak with the solo exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in New York in 2007. 

Nils Stærk would like to thank the board of the newly founded Tom Sandberg Foundation and the estate advisory board, who together with Tom Sandberg's family, have made this exhibition possible. 

Carlos Amorales
Backdrops for Ghosts
31.08. - 13.10.2018

Nils Stærk is proud to present the first solo exhibition by the Mexican artist Carlos Amorales. The exhibition Backdrops for ghosts will contain a series of new three-dimensional paintings with silkscreen ink on wooden panels, an installation of maquettes previously used for the artist’s film The Cursed Village shown at the 57th Venice Biennale and site-specific shadow paintings directly on the walls of the gallery space. Amorales’ work is interdisciplinary where the limits and coherence of art and society are explored in relation to language and the individual.

In 2017 Amorales represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale with the project Life in The Folds – a project that created new vocabularies, languages and settings through which life can reinvent itself. Starting out with paper cut-out shapes, Amorales created a series of abstract colorful collages – these abstractions became an illegible alphabet and a series of musical instruments that gave sound to each letter. All aspects were combined in the production of the puppet film The Cursed Village – a film telling the story of an immigrant family, whose destiny ends with being lynched in the foreign town. The maquettes from the film are placed as the central installation in the gallery and allow the viewer to become immersed in a fairytale world, that nevertheless points to urgent political issues. 

Amorales develops compositions and works that range from abstraction to conceptualization before converting into a phonetic language system and three-dimensional forms. In Backdrops for ghosts Amorales pushes visual abstraction into figuration and storytelling where the viewer will be absorbed by both a painting exhibition and a large puppet show. Amorales plays with the classical notions by inverting form and background. The characters in the exhibition are transformed into shadow paintings on the walls, whereas the backgrounds where they normally would be placed to perform, hang forward as a series of large scale painted wood collages. By placing the backdrop in the foreground, the exhibition Backdrops for Ghosts points towards a contemporary world that appears as upside down.

Carlos Amorales lives and works in Mexico City. He is represented in public art collections like; MoMA New York, Guggenheim Museum, TATE London, Museo Tamayo and MUAC, Mexico where he is currently presenting a comprehensive solo until September 19^th2018.