Introduction

Introduction

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.

Introduction

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

Introduction

The Danish artist 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’.

Introduction

Paul Fägerskiöldʼs 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.

Introduction

"The word ‘photography’ derives from the Greek phos, meaning light, and graphō which translates as writing, drawing or painting. If we look at the meaning of the word photography, we understand how crucial the question of light and the experience of colour is for photography, and also how it can lead to painting and to expressing oneself in colour. Photography is, in other words, painting with light. The paintings in the new series may seem a far cry from earlier, technically accomplished, large-format photographs of still, bare landscapes and environments in intense colours. These photographs are part of a tradition of Straight Photography, in which the subject is rendered without manipulation. The negative may not be cropped and advanced darkroom techniques are used to achieve an aesthetic characterised by sharpness, high contrast and rich tonality. Straight Photography refers to photography that renders a subject in sharp focus in accordance with the qualities that distinguish photography from other visual expressions, not least painting. The world should be represented as it really is. This reporting quality of uncompromising objectivity and avoidance of distortion, a striving for technical objectivity in the work, is also present in Mads Gamdrup’s new work. It is not only painting in a more general sense, but also a new and ingenious method in the continuing study of how much light colour can conceivably contain."

Except from "Photography is Painting with Light. Mads Gamdrup’s New Works” 2021 by Åsa Nacking

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

Working 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)

Introduction

The work of Rebecca Lindsmyr (b. 1990) 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. 

The materiality and process of paint(ing) is placed in relation to the materiality and process of embodiment - filtered through ideas formulated within psychoanalysis, medicine, gender and queer studies, phenomenology and philosophy. Through the work, one is confronted with one’s own bodily being, where senses of intimacy, sensuality, discomfort and disgust lie close at hand. 

Lindsmyr graduated with an MFA from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2021, and previously holds a BA from Glasgow School of Art.

Introduction

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 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.

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

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

Eduardo Terrazas (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. 

Introduction

Gert & Uwe Tobias was born and raised in Transylvania and is currently living in Cologne. They 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.

Figuration is always the focal point of the work, whether it is made sculpturally or picturesquely, and their unique way with imagery has become their trademark which has placed the artist duo firmly on the European contemporary art scene. Their artistic universe thus 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.

Their works are exhibited in a large number of museums around the world. Including solo exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunsthalle Recklinghausen; Sprengel Museum, Hanover; Whitechapel, London; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia; Kunstmuseum Bonn; UCLA, Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

They are represented in a number of public museum collections. Including MoMa, Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; UCLA, Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Collezione Maramotti, Max Mara, Reggio Emilia; Kunstmuseum Bonn; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand; Collection Goetz, Munich; Sprengel Museum, Hanover; Graphic State Collection, Munich.