Two exhibitions
dal 21/6/2005 al 21/8/2005
Segnalato da
21/6/2005
Two exhibitions
Malmo Konsthall, Malmo
Jacob Dahlgren and Katarina Lofstrom. The artists' works are primarily neither theoretical nor conceptual but visual and emotional. A central aspect of the exhibition is the way in which things that are apparently simple become – through their transformation by the artist and our own perception – something sensual, poetic and significant.
Jacob Dahlgren and Katarina Lofstrom
The exhibition at Malmö Konsthall of works by Jacob Dahlgren and Katarina
Löfström presents two separate artists. But between their works
interesting encounters arise – aesthetic, formal, and in terms of content
– not least between the concrete, the representative, and the abstract.
The two artists’ works are primarily neither theoretical nor conceptual
but visual and emotional. A central aspect of the exhibition is the way in
which things that are apparently simple become – through their
transformation by the artist and our own perception (and imagination) –
something sensual, poetic and significant. By creating what we experience
as abstract images, the artists on the one hand set us free from the
limiting literalness of pure representation and make possible narratives
(and emotions) with multiple layers of meaning in us, the observers. On
the other hand, the artists also stress the concrete aspects (materials
and form) as well as the fragmentarily representative, which is their way
of simultaneously presenting content and creating a starting point for our
interpretation.
Jacob Dahlgren is a painter and sculptor but he works to a large extent
without the traditional materials of painting and sculpture. Instead, his
abstract works consist of objects which surround us in our everyday life.
They might be coat-hangers, coffee mugs, lamps, or, as in this exhibition
at Malmö Konsthall, a range of different materials. Arranged (for instance
stacked on top of one another), the individual objects lose their intended
function, their original value, and become part of something completely
new. They become materials with which to paint; they become colours and
shapes which form the basis of exciting visual experiences and a kind of
“open†and democratic aesthetics which challenges our ingrained ideas. By
deliberately misunderstanding one of Marcel Duchamp’s famous arguments, we
can develop the (possibly a provocative) idea that Jacob Dahlgren’s work
at Malmö Konsthall is a form of painting. For Duchamp’s simple observation
that even the most complex painting is constructed of pre-existing
materials (and is therefore to be regarded as a readymade), opens up the
logical possibility of in fact being able to paint even with
unconventional forms of paint – in principle with anything at all. But one
swallow does not make a summer, nor does one dishcloth make a painting.
Superfluity is a prerequisite if Dahlgren’s painterly abstract strategy is
to work. In Colour reading and contexture (2005), it is the absurd amount
of materials which creates the concentration and compactness that make the
work so visually captivating, sensual and interesting in terms of its form.
Katarina Löfström works with animated videos which relate to painting,
and, in her later works, also to drawing. In her works she combines the
representative and the everyday with the abstract. Hang Ten Sunset (2000),
one of the two works shown at Malmö Konsthall, undeniably bears the legacy
of modernism’s colour field painting. But Löfström also plays with another
kind of culture. Aided by its title, the work recalls the flashy decade of
the 1980s – a surfer society clothed in horizontally striped T-shirts on a
beach in front of a kitschy sunset. Combining in this way aspects of
popular culture with art history and purely visual, sometimes hypnotic
qualities is typical of her work. In An Island (2004), the starting point
is in fact the Stockholm amusement park Gröna Lund – in real life
characterised by stress, hubbub and noise but which in Löfström’s work has
instead a meditative calm. But what is interesting in view of these
thoughts and ideas are not the references themselves – the playing with
history, the praise (or criticism) – but rather the fact that her “impureâ€
(and not even completely non-figurative) works in a way achieve what so
many of modernism’s abstract painters, through their purism, tried to
achieve – but better. Liberated from history, theory and the
romanticisation of Art, she embodies their dream of narratives in an
abstract language of colour and form, free to directly express mystical,
spiritual forces and emotions. Katarina Löfström succeeds in transforming
the obscure into something clear, without thereby making it possible to
explain in words.
Jacob Dahlgren and Katarina Löfström were both born in 1970. They are both
based in Stockholm and trained there at the Royal University College of
Fine Arts and the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design
respectively.
Members of the press are cordially invited to a preview Wednesday, June 22 at 11 a.m.
Together with the artists, director Lars Grambye will introduce the exhibition.
Afterwards, at about 12 o’clock, lunch will be served in the restaurant.
Image: Jacob Dahlgren, Colour reading and contexture, 2002
Malmo Konsthall
S:t Johannesgatan 7 - Malmo