About

ABOUT

Olaf Breuning (b. 1970, Schaffhausen, Switzerland) lives and works in New York. Breuning works in different mediums including photography, drawing, sculpture, video, and installation. In his work Breuning explores the boundaries between fact and fiction, where art becomes a part of life and not as an isolated world that unfolds in parallel with the rest of society.

At first sight, Breuning’s humoristic self-irony may appear simplified and accessible, but when you look closer his works are deep and complex. Breuning mixes elements from high and low culture, where canonical works from art history stand side by side with phenomena from popular culture. In an eclectic manner, he identifies elements from Western visual culture and stages them anew - often with an absurd or humorous twist. In other words, Breuning embeds reflections on the lifestyle and consumerism of today’s Western society in his works.

Breuning has been shown at NRW Forum Düsseldorf, DE; The Public Art Fund, Firedman Plaza, New York, US; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, ICA London, UK; PS1 MOMA, New York, US; Migros Musum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, CH; Haus der Kunst, Munich, DE; Tinguely Museum, Basel, CH.

About

about

Ingvar Cronhammar’s works place themselves in the field between architecture, art, and design. Cronhammer’s work reveals a fascination of the industrial, and throughout the creation process the possibilities of technology are utilized to its full potential. It incites to slow paced thoughtfulness, but underneath the surface lurks an unease in the realization of recognizing something one has never before seen.

In 2001 Cronhammer build one of his most significant and important public art installations, ELIA, that has become a landmark for the area of Herning, Denmark. The massive art installations towering up, both in physical terms and by virtue of its artistic scale.

About

Gardar Eide Einarsson explores themes of personal liberty, belonging, and the ideological effects of propaganda through found materials and diverse media such as installations, paintings, and sculptures. His work navigates the tension between personal liberty and the constraints imposed by collective systems, often with a wry sense of humor. While invoking themes of subversion and anti-institutional critique, Einarsson’s work situates itself within a broader reflection on the artist’s classical role in society rather than a direct call for upheaval.

By interrogating how images and materials shape ideological constructs, Einarsson reflects on the intersections of freedom, belonging, and propaganda. His practice critically engages with contemporary art's institutional framework, exploring how individual and collective identities are shaped within these structures. Through his nuanced approach, Einarsson challenges viewers to reconsider the boundaries between autonomy and conformity in a highly mediated world.

About

About

FOS' (Thomas Poulsen, b. 1971) artistic practice is diverse and moves through many genres and materials. It encompasses, in the broadest sense, sculpture, installation, music, architecture, and design. FOS' works explore how the language of objects and space define us as social beings.

FOS is generally interested in how art can function as an alternative to the systems that normally regulate our behaviour in our civil societies. His art often resides in social spaces, which enables new possibilities of sociality to arise – FOS hereby connects art, design and architecture in a hybridform, which he calls ’Social Design’.

About

Paul Fägerskiöldʼs (b. 1982) paintings can be seen as an ongoing attempt to build up a lexicon of visual language. He employs elements from moments in the history of painting as much as symbols and signs from visual culture outside the discourse of painting from sources both “high” and “low”.

In his practice Fägerskiöld explores how meaning is created via language, how it can be generated in pictorial space, and how perception functions. There are no figures in the paintings which are instead dependent on the presence of an observer as co-creator of meaning, whether via thought or movement.

Fägerskiöld's work examines the ambivalence that exists between image, painting, idea, and material. There is only one subject in each of his paintings. Relationships do not exist within the paintings themselves but are generated between the surface, the image and the viewer.

About

Mads Gamdrup (b. 1967) works with the potential of monochromatic photography and its strength as artistic statement in relation to a number of phenomena, such as distance, transparency, spirituality and materiality. Gamdrup explores the boundaries and possibilities of photography using Newton’s and Goethe's colour theories. Using a special technique called Monochrome Colour Noise each colour's exceptional resonance is manipulated by creating degrees of transparency within the individual colour unit - from pure colour to pure light. Gamdrup uses a colour palette assembled over the years from the pixelated noise, which has come into being in the transfer of his own analogous photos to digital ones. In the darkroom he has defined the colours on paper via different wavelengths of light, visualized as gradings of stripes, drips, or bubbles.

Faced with these grand photos, the spectator is exposed to a plethora of flickering, dizzy colours, tricking the eye into perceiving them as vibrant and practically breathing entities. The figurative object of the photo is removed, and the abstract appearance makes the works resemble Klein and Rothko’s monochromatic paintings more closely than they do photographs. By using the photo's technical starting point as an explicit basis for his beautiful colour compositions Gamdrup singles out a historical ambiguity between art and technology in this medium.

About

The artistic practise of the Danish/Norwegian artist Nils Erik Gjerdevik (1962 – 2016) consisted of painting and ceramic sculptures, as well as individual works on paper. Nils Erik Gjerdevik was well known for his non-figurative paintings that challenge all the set rules and conventions of painting as a genre. He always confronted our idea of how a painting should be presented through his use of peculiar formats, alternative colours and composition rarely built around the classical notion of harmony. His paintings tend toward a more double-edged expression where seemingly divergent ideas and movement meet and become one and the same image. This practice applies to his drawings and his ceramic sculpture work as well. 

About

Norwegian artist Jone Kvie (b. 1971) represents a generation of contemporary artists working in the field of sculpture and installation, reflecting classical and modernist practices to address contemporary notions of sculpture

Kvie's work is inspired by and contains references to a broad range of diverse subjects including the natural sciences and nature from stalactite caves to drifting ice blocks, whirlpools, mountain landscapes and meteors.

About

Michael Kvium (b. 1955) have since his paintings and performances of the 1980's focused on uncompromising descriptions of the aspects of life that we rather hide than expose to observation. In recent years Kvium's grotesque and twisted depictions of the human body are companied by beautiful landscapes and animal motives. Death acts as a constant presence in Kvium's works, reminding us of the paradoxical consequence of conception. Michael Kvium's painterly stagings contain associations to a theatre stage.

About

Runo Lagomarsino (b. 1977) works with a range of materials, such as installations, sculpture, drawings performance and actions Lagomarsinos work points towards the gaps and cracks in our explanation models and truth claims, highlighting its precarious foundation.

Language, geography, historiography and power are themes that Lagomarsino revisit in his praxis, using materials that often evoke memories of our past, only to ask us to reflect on the conditions enabling these connections. His praxis aims at imagining another form of discourse, through subtle transformations on how we perceive an object or a detail in a narrative. Lagomarsino often starts with something familiar, not to say traditional; forms, which he then attacks, shift, transcend, scrutinize and confronts.

His works often take a starting point in the colonial heritage of contemporary Latin America: the effects of violence and dominance revealed in a drawing of national boundaries on a map, in the iconography of a wallpaper pattern, or in the documentation of a football match. On a profound level, Lagomarsino’s oeuvre belongs to a critical, decolonial project. Nevertheless, he does not primarily seek to tell other stories, or to reveal hidden truths or construct new historical narratives from the perspective of the colonial subjects. Instead, his constellations of objects are aimed at telling the same stories in different ways, at uncovering conflicting dependencies and complex political events without reducing their inevitable ambiguity.

Lagomarsino works has been exhibited in institutions such as Reina Sofía, Madrid, LACMA, Los Angeles and Moderna Museet Stockholm. He has participated in the Venice Biennial (2011 and 2015), The São Paulo Biennial (2012) The Istanbul Biennal (2011), The Gwangju Biennale (2008) and The Prospect Triennial, New Orleans (2017)

About

Rebecca Lindsmyr's (b. 1990) works evolves from an interest in the complexities of the embodied self - as simultaneously being a subject of experience and an object in the world. These dual, or multiple vantage points render the self sensitive to relations of power, as well as historically, politically, socially and emotionally shifting understandings of the body. Due to this sensitivity, the embodied self becomes a mirror of its time and context; as time penetrates it and continuously (re)shapes it. 

In Lindsmyr’s practice, this fluidity and sensitivity is explored in relation to painting. Significance is placed on the border between subject and object - a position of being neither, and simultaneously both. A position which the embodied self and the painting structurally can be argued to share. Here, theories of the abject are important; as both the in-between noun and the (violent) process of breaking away from binary categories, or breaking away to form anew. The abject makes possible a performative, plastic view on the self - where the materiality of the body becomes able to hold and tell a narrative. 

About

About

Matthew Ronay’s (b. 1976) works invite viewers into a mythological realm where abstract forms meet metaphysical energies. His creative process, rooted in automatic drawing, allows subconscious impulses to shape intricate sculptures that appear to grow autonomously. Inspired by the natural world, Ronay incorporates biomorphic shapes to explore themes of reproduction and decay. Using basswood, he crafts each piece unassisted, finishing them with rhythmic textures and vibrant colors that evoke a tactile, sensory connection.

At the core of Ronay’s practice is his ability to merge disparate elements into harmonious compositions that feel both familiar and otherworldly. By emphasizing the spaces between his sculptures’ components, he fosters a dynamic balance of tension and unity, inviting viewers to reflect on the interplay between humanity and nature. This immersive experience not only draws attention to the works’ physicality but also unveils deeper layers of psychological and emotional resonance.

About

Torbjørn Rødland's (b. 1970) photographs are produced through film-based cameras and chemical processing. His self-aware and often uncanny photographs, films, and books are saturated with symbolism, lyricism, and eroticism. They take on existing visual forms and genres from still lives to portraits to landscapes, but without the research tone of first-wave conceptual art or the ironic commentary of the subsequent Pictures Generation. Attempts to seize and to integrate truth, rather than to deconstruct it, accompany Rødland's inclination to delve into problematic aspects of contemporary photography and the history of art. He probes popular visual languages in search of both spiritual and perverse qualities, so as to prolong our engagement with the single and the moving image.

About

Since the 1970s Tom Sandberg has worked continuously with the black and white photograph in an uncompromising, poetic and seductive manner. With a diverse subject matter that includes classical studies of the female body, natural objects, land-scapes, people on the street, cloud formations, airplanes, cars and much more, Sandberg consequently masters to infuse his pictures with a strong sense of intensity and personal presence.

Tom Sandberg explores the photograph as a language and he generally works with his subjects abstractly as well as formally and sculpturally.

About

Tove Storch’s (b. 1981) artistic project can be viewed as a continuous investigation of sculptural possibilities. Her works challenge the viewer’s perception of space and reality, posing questions about what sculpture is and what it can do. Combining a tight minimal expression with delicate, fragile materials, her works give physical shape to complex reflections on form, time, and space. Her mode of expression is positioned between the strictly formal and something directly connected to the body and emotions.

About

About

Ed Templeton (b. 1972) is a multidisciplinary artist whose photography explores themes of identity, subcultures, and the complexities of human connection. Known for his candid and evocative imagery, Templeton captures raw moments of vulnerability and resilience, often focusing on people at the edges of mainstream society. His work is marked by a blend of documentary precision and personal expression, with many pieces enhanced by hand-drawn illustrations and text, turning photographs into layered narratives.

While Templeton initially rose to prominence as a professional skateboarder, this background serves as a contextual layer in his work, offering insights into subcultures and the social dynamics he documents. By merging stark realism with poetic commentary, Templeton has carved out a unique space in contemporary art, bridging street culture with fine art photography.

About

Eduardo Terrazas (b. 1936) is a Mexican creator who has taken a genuine interest in studying and contemplating the complexity of our contemporary world. Spirit, beauty, order, and technique are the cornerstones that define his visual universe.

An architect by training, he obtained his Bachelor’s degree at UNAM Mexico, and then a Master’s, at Cornell University, New York. But his endeavors –for over fifty years- include an array of disciplines: design, architecture, urban and regional planning, visual arts and environmental issues, responding and reflecting creatively to our changing reality, proposing alternate methods of inhabiting our world, different forms to relate one another, new ways to portray and understand our cosmos.

Terrazas sees his transit through these disciplines, as different pathways that nevertheless run parallel, as resources to approach concerns that range from philosophy to science. 

He is one of the few Mexicans who work with the geometric abstraction to establish a dialogue between the formal occidental aesthetics and the indigenous crafts techniques. 

About

Gert & Uwe Tobias (b. 1973) are known for their unique imagery, inspired by both the traditional folk myths of their country of origin and popular culture. Their artistic practice comprises ceramic sculptures, painting, paperwork and large color woodcuts on canvases, the latter which combine the classic painting genre with a well-known printing technique used for the traditional propaganda making as well as in pop art’s repetition of motifs. Instead of carving out the figure into the block of wood, they shape the individual motifs in plywood and use a roller to apply the paint to the surface of each form, which finally transfers the color to the canvas. In this way, Gert and Uwe Tobias develop a well-known tradition and method.

Their artistic universe has a direct connection to different art historical and cultural epochs, and in this way also reflects the anti-nostalgic use of images of current popular culture. Inspired by surrealism and abstract modernism, art history is an essential key to opening and grasping Gert & Uwe Tobias’ distinctive imagery. This matrix of isms breaks down the conventional distinction between art and craft and provides a renewed opportunity for the imagery of the works to re-emerge on its own terms – as an allegory of the fluctuating character that characterizes the contemporary art experience.