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25/11/2011

Lone Haugaard Madsen / Rolf Nowotny

Overgaden - Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen

Lone Haugaard Madsen: Rum #310

Old newspapers and exhibition posters, overalls, transport blankets, used stirring sticks and leftovers from other artists’ studios acquire new life in Lone Haugaard Madsen’s sculptural improvisations, which, in a balancing act between intuitive play and analytical precision, interact with the spaces in which the works are created and presented.

While Lone Haugaard Madsen has had several solo exhibitions around Europe the show at Overgaden is the first larger presentation of her work in a Danish context. Scattered throughout the entire ground floor, groups of enormous paintings, found objects and ready-mades, either brought from Haugaard’s workshop in Vienna or selected from the storage rooms at Overgaden, will take shape on-site and become part of a carefully-orchestrated whole, in which elements of humour, poetry and irony mingle with phenomenological considerations.

In a cross-field between painting, sculpture, object, photography, sound, text and performance, Lone Haugaard Madsen has developed a distinctive conceptual expression that bears clear traces of the artistic workflow. Often, she allows random and practical conditions, such as the width of a door or the amount of paint remaining in a tube, to dictate the framework for the production of her works, and in recent years, she has consciously worked to blur the distinction between the workshop and exhibition space.

Commenting on her work, she says:
The actual site of the production of art fascinates me. My workshop serves as a collection centre for all kinds of materials collected from the urban environment or artist colleagues, or brought from previous exhibition venues. This gives rise to a circulation of crates that I send out ahead to the places where I will be exhibiting. Here I often work on-site and use the exhibition space as a workshop. On the basis of the mobile workshop, Lone Haugaard Madsen shifts focus from the finished work to the process behind it. In her practice, the venerated art object is pulled down from its pedestal to en- courage reflection on the conditions of art production and the surrounding context.

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Rolf Nowotny: Full Frontal Nudity

Does the world exist without language? Does the work of art? These are the kind of philosophical and existential questions that Rolf Nowotny addresses in his solo exhibition Full Frontal Nudity, in which he presents a new, extensive installation that attempts to approach the concrete object by leaving only the bare material behind.

In the large room on Overgaden’s top floor, low-lying, rectangular glass panels in the room intersect with displaced horizontal planes which frame and mirror a series of unglazed dishes, bowls, jars and vases of red clay, placed directly on the floor. Like a walk among trees and bushes in a park, the glass panels indicate routes into the exhibition and present the viewer with various perspectives on the cera- mic objects. In the labyrinthine maze of paths you can get up close and focus on the details, or retreat to the ashtrays, which are mounted on the wall as lookout posts, from where you can gain an overview of the landscape in its entirety.

In a movement which is both physical and metaphorical, the sculptural objects alter from open to ever more closed forms, thereby creating a smooth transition between the individual works.

Rolf Nowotny comments on the exhibition:
With this exhibition, I am attempting to create a collective installation of objects, rather than individual works. I have for a long time spoken of my work as a “family of things”, but this time I want to break down their individuality and create an overall statement.
Via a thematisation of the fluid and metamorphic nature of the artwork, Nowotny invites us to reflect on our relationship with the world of objects. When the narrative layers of meaning of the works are peeled away, what remains are glossy surfaces for our own mental projections, presented as open spaces of association, where meaning is not fixed, but is constantly coming into being.
Image: Lone Haugaard Madsen, Raum #255, 2010

Overgaden - Institute of Contemporary Art
Overgaden Neden Vandet 17 - Copenhagen K
Tuesday - Sunday: 1-5pm, Thursday: 1-8pm.
Free admittance

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