Artists

Introduction

Carlos Amorales is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the limits of language and translation systems to venture into the field of cultural experimentation. He uses graphic production as a tool to develop linguistic structures and alternative working models that allow new forms of interpretation and foster collectivity. In his projects, Amorales examines identity construction processes, proposes a constant re signification of forms present in his work, and provokes a clash between art and pop culture. 

Introduction

Miriam Bäckström has worked since the mid-90s, with indirect modes of portraiture. She has photographed different interiors, including film sets, environments considered significant enough to be rebuilt in museums, model homes in commercially redeveloped areas and the apartments of either living or deceased people. Bäckström probes the limits of documentation by taking pictures of interiors whose appearance of objectivity imperceptibly acquires a fictional quality. Seemingly familiar, these interiors compel us to invent stories about those who may have occupied them.

In recent years Bäckström has worked with tapestry in large formats, where the photographic motif has been woven in one piece.

Introduction

At first sight, Olaf Breuning’s humoristic self-irony may appear simplified and accessible. But when one enters into his imagery, one discovers that it is rather more complex. The multilayered works comprise reflections on western society. While Breuning possesses the ability to see through our smug and hypocritical society, he does not dissociate himself from it. Instead, he takes part in it, accepting the conditions of our time and seemingly enjoying them.

Introduction

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.

Introduction

Gardar Eide Einarsson works with the notion of sub cultures and how to access these environments. He addresses this subject matter through diverse media as installations, paintings, sculptures etc. The notion of subversion and the undermining of the establishment is present, yet without being an aspiration of the artist, this obviously point to the classical notion of the artist’s position in society. All his works relate to the anti institutional and to the interference of concepts of freedom and the structures and organizations in society. 

Introduction

Guatemalan artist Darío Escobar’s (b. 1971) lives and works in Guatemala City. He works in various media: sculpture, installation, painting, and drawing. His work often makes use of the concept of the readymade, but the objects Escobar choose are always altered in some way or another. Through the alterations as well as the placement in an artistic context the objects gain new meanings. General themes in Escobar’s work are the complex relations between globalization, aesthetics, colonialism, modernism and consumerism.

Introduction

FOS (Thomas Poulsen, b. 1971, DK) is internationally acclaimed for his uncompromising artworks that investigate the crossroads between art and design. In his practice, he often merges functionality with popular appeal and explores how our physical surroundings and social relations influences each another. The works reach out to the society and our everyday life with a common point of departure in what FOS refers to as social design. 

Introduction

The Danish artist Mads Gamdrup (b. 1967) has worked and explored the photographic media for the past decades. He 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 color theories. Using a special technique called Monochrome Color Noise each color's exceptional resonance is manipulated by creating degrees of transparency within the individual color unit - from pure color to pure light.

Introduction

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. 

Introduction

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.

Introduction

Since the paintings and performances of the 1980's Michael Kvium's works have 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.

Introduction

Runo Lagomarsino (b.1977, Sweden) develops works that presents a critical vision on the construction of history-based themes or analyses connections between modernism and current geopolitics. Lagomarsino’s work present a well-defined political position, posses an unfinished and fragmented aspect, and act as provocative and open reflections on relations of territory and exclusion.

Introduction

Lea Porsager (b. 1981, Frederikssund, Denmark) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2010. She began her studies as a PhD fellow at Malmö Art Academy and Lund University in September 2015. Porsager’s practice interweaves fabulation and speculation with a variety of mediums including film, sculpture, photography and text. Her works encompass science, politics, feminism and esotericism. Porsager was selected CERN Honorary Mentions for the Collide International Award 2018. In 2012, Porsager participated in dOCUMENTA(13) with the Anatta Experiment. She was awarded the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Scholarship in 2014. In 2015, Porsager partook in the 14th Istanbul Biennial Saltwater: a Theory of Thought Forms as Annie Besant’s “medium,” recreating thirty-six of Besant’s watercolors from the book Thought Forms (1905). Porsager's earthwork and memorial Gravitational Ripples was inaugurated in June 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden, commemorating the Swedish lives lost in the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia.

Introduction

Matthew Ronay's sculptural works are like mythological visions that embrace the mystical and strange without loosing the ability to impact the viewer on a fundamentally human level. Ronay works with humble materials such as wood, papier mâché and fabric and sets forth oppositions such as male/female; life/death; light/darkness; and reality/unreality. Both formally and as regards to content Ronay's artistic universe is informed by the spirituality and design of some non-western cultures as well as the cosmology of science fiction.

Introduction

Torbjørn Rødland’s photographic work is informed by the American “Pictures Generation” that included Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. This generation had great artistic success with conceptual and staged or appropriated photography in the 1980s. Building on the criticality and deep self-awareness of postmodern appropriation, Rødland’s images have since the mid-90s quietly reintroduced lyricism, psychology, eroticism and spirituality.

Introduction

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.

Introduction

Danish artist Tove Storch's (b. 1981) artistic project can be viewed as a continuous investigation of sculptural possibilities. Her works challenges the viewer’s perception of space and reality and ask questions to what sculpture is and what it’s able to do. In a combination of a tight minimal expression and delicate, fragile materials her works give physical shape to complex reflections on form, time and space.

Introduction

Californian artist Thaddeus Strode (born 1964) has over the past years developed his own pictorial language, where his references to American illustration and comics have shifted more and more to the benefit of purely painterly motives. Strode, who prefers a quick, manner of painting, works primarily with popular household paints, combining them with different materials to achieve a translucent paint surface. Finally, he combines his painting with drawing, spray and collage. Interlacing these different techniques and materials, the artist creates complex, multi-layered images that leave the process of the work visible.

Introduction

Introduction

As former pro skateboarding prodigy Templeton refine the future of the sport through the 80s and the 90s, where he turned pro. Templeton’s early skate fame gave him a forum to discuss issues like racism and homophobia that weren’t getting much play among the Thrasher set. It also gave him free reign to lead skateboarding away from the halfpipe and into the terrain of the real world, though he’s predictably modest about his pioneering role.

By the mid-90s Templeton had turned into a businessman and an artist, a kind of unwitting archetype for a new Renaissance man of street culture. Templeton began experimenting with photography in 1995, once again finding himself on the vanguard of a new cutting edge: the mix of social documentary and personal expression.

Introduction

The works are bound together through the common interest in structure and tactility – themes that seem also to connect Eduardo Terrazas' work as an artist and as an architect. Terrazas got his broad breakthrough in 1968 when he designed the visual identity for the Olympic Games in Mexico.

Terrazas’ art exists in a constant dialogue with the society that surrounds him. Like this work that applies a technique that has been used for centuries by the indigenous Mexican tribe Huichol. Wooden panels are covered with Campeche wax into which threads of yarn are laid to compose a pattern made by Terrazas. Terrazas works in series where he explores the possible variations of a chosen structure, which seem to become indefinite when lines and colors are juxtaposed.

Introduction

The Transylvanian-born Germany based artists, Gert & Uwe Tobias are collaborators and identical twins. The Tobias brothers paint, sculpt, draw with a typewriter and make large scale woodcuts. Their renewed and colourful take on traditional medias such as ceramics and woodcuts form the body of their work together with an almost nostalgic approach to making art, as each work is handmade by both sets of artists hands. In their exhibitions, the Tobias brothers often combine these media; the almost animalistic ceramics and large-scale woodcuts together – all of which display lush, vivid colour and strong graphic compositions. Drawing on sources as diverse as popular culture, traditional Eastern European folk art and art historical movements such as constructivism, the Tobias brothers create artworks that are both playful and haunting.