14/5/2015
Nicholas Gottlund
Melk, Oslo
Living. The photograph becomes a book, the book's making informs the sculpture, the sculpture and photograph become an exhibition.
The photograph becomes a book, the book’s making informs the sculpture, the sculpture and photograph become an exhibition.
MELK is proud to present the first exhibition in Scandinavia by Los Angeles based artist Nicholas Gottlund.
The color bar sculptures are called Spanners. Strictly speaking they are book cloth wrapped and glued around a thin aluminum bar.
The colors in each of the individual sculptures are set up in a way so that they can be read from left to right or from right to left. The colors at the end of each piece may be imagined to bleed off the edge and run into a non–printed space.
By contrast to their ends, what happens within each sculpture is that when two pieces of cloth meet (in that juncture of color) you often see a run off or a series of little white tips from the underlying thread which read as a series of dots.
If we can expand the idea of treating the wall like the page and connect it more broadly to the notion of the focal point versus the periphery, then by hanging something very low on the wall in addition to something that is centered to the height of the eye, all points have been given equal weight and value.
Since the exhibition of the first Spanners in Chicago a year ago, Gottlund has created 30 additional pieces that utilize nearly all of the colors available within this range of book cloth. By working with a broader range of color the role of repetition or lack thereof has been brought to the forefront. What he finds most satisfying is working with these pieces as a whole installation or body of work, rather than individual artworks. The repeat and rhythm of the colors across the linear border that the pieces create relates back to the cadence and timing within the printing process. When the repeat is interrupted, broken or adjusted he finds the pieces become the most engaging. Those skips, breaks and anomalies align the work less with the original ideas associated with mechanical reproduction and more with the hand and experimentation. It is this mutability within an otherwise rigid system that Gottlund finds the most exciting.
Nicholas Gottlund (b. 1981 Kutztown, P.A.) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received his BFA from M.I.C.A. Baltimore in 2004 and founded Gottlund Verlag in 2007. His work has been shown through solo exhibitions at Art Metropole, Toronto; Working Title, Toronto; PLHK, Chicago; Temple Gallery, Paris; Karma, New York; Contemporary Museum, Baltimore; Capricious, New York and Bodega, Philadelphia. Selected group exhibitions include Human Resources, Los Angeles; Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam; Otras Obras, Tijuana and Open Space, Baltimore. Gottlund has published several publications under the publishing house Gottlund Verlag. This is the artists first exhibition in Scandinavia.
The exhibition is supported by the Arts Council Norway.
Image: Nicholas Gottlund – 10 West, 2013, C-print, 30×22 cm image, 30×25 cm sheet, edition of 5
Opening: Friday 15 May 2015 7pm
MELK
Borggata 7
Oslo
Opening hours
Thursday – Saturday 12pm – 4pm during exhibitions or by appointment.