24/10/2006
Tommy Stockel
Iaspis, Stockholm
In Tommy Stockel’s constructions, hyper design is blended with classic archetypal form. He uses paper, cardboard, foam and polystyrene to create sculptures and collages that play with design histories.
Clash of the Classics
In Tommy Stockel’s constructions, hyper design is blended with classic
archetypal form. He uses paper, cardboard, foam and polystyrene to create sculptures
and collages that play with design histories. Both the gallery floor and walls are
sites for Stockel’s sculptures, which can take organic as well as
machine-made shapes. His works re-describe the boundaries between 2D and 3D
installations through warped angles and perspectives, creating a slight nausea
within the white cube. The works are dressed up as classical sculpture, but at times
using subtle modifications referring to the Renaissance canon, molecular structure
and artificial life. Contemporary sci-fi art usually wrestles with premises from the
academic world of natural science and empirical research, but, interestingly,
Stockel manages to merge artistic paradigms with scientific ones.
A text about the artist accompanies the exhibition, written as an imaginative
conversation between Tommy Stockel, the mathematically inspired 20th century
artist M. C. Escher and Robert Stasinski, project manager at Iaspis. The
conversation attempts to bridge the gap of the modernist construct of physicality
and today’s microcosm of nano-technologies, made through a dialogue on the works of
Stockel.
Tommy Stockel, born in 1972 in Copenhagen, lives and works in Berlin. In
2006, he held a NIFCA-residency at Iaspis in Stockholm, where parts of the present
exhibition was formed.
Opening 25 October 6-8 PM
6.30 PM Turing test performed on Tommy Stockel by Robert Stasinski
Iaspis
International Artist Studio Program in Sweden - Stockholm