»PERCEPTIONS«

Dawid, Henrik Isaksson Garnell, Martin Mlecko, Uta Neumann, Henrik Strömberg, Pernilla Zetterman

Opening: Friday, June 24, 2016, 18-21h
Exhibition: June 25 – September 10, 2016
Finissage: Friday, September 9, 2016, 18-21h, details see below

Summer break: July 27 – August 25, 2016

Opening hours: Wed-Sat 12-18h, and by appointment
Admission free
Wheelchair accessible: Yes

Our perception constantly channels and processes the steady stream of information and stimuli that we are exposed to. Perceptions seeks to approach this subject by showing the works of six artists that challenge and thematise our perception in a variety of ways.

Swedish artist Dawid (Björn Dawidsson), born in the Swedish town of Örebro in 1949, has engaged and challenged the medium of photography for the past fifty years by isolating the image/object from its reality and neutralising the background. In a playful manner, he keeps presenting shifting views of ordinary and extraordinary objects. He sees a cross embedded in the bark of a birch tree, for instance, takes it out of its original context, and turns it into an abstract piece of art. His photographs confirm existing shapes while radically calling them into question at the same time, and in doing so probe our perception.

Light and composition play the lead in the oeuvre of Henrik Strömberg, born in southern Sweden in 1970. His works are the result of multi-layered processes in which he deconstructs, isolates and reassembles the most diverse objects, image elements and photographs. Many things in Strömberg’s images remain obscured, such as the one titled “Door” from 2013, which is a work that obscures more than it reveals and that puts our perception of bright and dark to the test. The silhouette of a door is created solely by light, reinforced by a light box, and thus becoming a light sculpture.

The “Positions” by Martin Mlecko, born in the German town of Essen in 1951, consist of horizontal and vertical lines drawn free-hand. Pencil and charcoal on ordinary writing paper. The drawing surface remains present. The lines on it form grids as if they were the representation of a fundamental ordering and structuring principle: Parallel horizontal lines and vertical lines intersect at right angles. Without vying for attention in any way, the innocuous graphite meshworks describe paradoxes while highlighting the kinship of opposites. In the process, the question presents itself: Do we actually see a grid, or do we behold traced pencil lines that we wish to see as grids?

Control, discipline and physical strain are the subjects favoured by Pernilla Zetterman, born in Stockholm in 1970. A recurring moment in her oeuvre is the relentless repetition that is part of exercising if you want to improve your performance.
Being dyslexic, she has a generally differentiated perception, and shares it in a lyrical and striking way. In her series “Grammar,” Zetterman worked with letters as symbols in order to explore linguistic codification. The word combinations she used were taken from a study on dyslexia.

The composition “ISHI” (rock) by Uta Neumann, born in Detmold, Germany, in 1976, consists of thirteen photographs of the same motif of a rock that show a varying greyscale ratio of bright to dark. “Each increment of emergence alters the material nature of the subject; each aspect that emerges causes another one to retreat into the background: dissolution evolves into the extraction of a presence and of the characteristics of the object at hand. As it obscures one part, the oscillation between “being” and “not being” coincides with an awareness and presence of the obscure” (Uta Neumann).

Henrik Isaksson Garnell, born in Stockholm in 1987, creates works that resemble lab situations in which he discovers new forms of life, both in a physical and in a mental sense. Similar to Mary Shelley’s efforts to bring the fiction underlying her work Frankenstein to life, Isaksson Garnell creates objects that seem to come from another galaxy, captured in photographs of scientific accuracy. However, Garnell’s pictures would be misleading to any scientist hunting for material evidence, because nothing about them can be trusted. Evidence of a parallel universe perhaps?

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Finissage of the group exhibition PERCEPTIONS with a live music performance on Friday, September 9, 2016, 6 – 9 pm.

Music performance at 8 pm:
13 framings of a static figure emerging from a shifting ground. A sonic response to Uta Neumann’s photographic series ‘ISHI–stone/will’.
Rebecca Lane – bass flute
Bryan Eubanks – field recording & sine tones 

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