Boisterous - Loud and Energetic (010)

Participating artists include: Maiken Bent (DK), Peter Bonde (DK), Slater Bradley (USA), Susan Philipz (UK), Anselm Reyle (DE), Jakob Rød (DK), Anja Schwörer (DE), and Gert & Uwe Tobias (RO).

Traditionally speaking, the range of these artists’ work is difficult to contextualize. BOISTEROUS! provides the strategy for linking these seemingly very different artists and their work. Think of it as being to a Slayer or Motley Crüe concert, however the viewer is not only called upon to experience the power of sound, but also that of paint, film, and sculpture. The exasperating effect of the works should leave the viewer feeling a sense of catharsis, or emotional cleansing, similar to the effect Aristotle described that ideally overcame an audience after having experienced a Greek tragedy... or more contemporarily speaking, a Martin Scorsese film.

Maiken Bent (DK), recent graduate from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, brings to her installation pieces a sense of the no-mans-zone existing on the border of art meets design. An ambiguous fascination with the shiny pages of an interior design magazine is twisted into her own expression of objects for the designed home. A process that seems to state: jump into the deep-end, because you can. Bent presents two works from the serie ”Onkel Grøn, Onkel Blå, Onkel Lilla” which translates ”Uncle Green, Uncle Blue, Uncle Purple.

Peter Bonde (DK), explores the bonds of painting and art in general in his unpolished, yet aesthetically conscious works. Painting in its clean form, produced with untraditional methods and materials, combined with words, sentences even, on monochrome surfaces, plays the irony game with both language and painting, the language of painting. Provocative and unconventional, his works investigate the possibilities of aesthetic.

Bonde participates with ”WAXINYOURINNEREAR”.

Slater Bradley (US), will be participating with a video called Year of the Doppelganger, which is part of an ongoing performance project begun in 1999, in which the artist has been exploring the psychologically charged space between self and one's mirror image. In myth and literature, the doppelganger is an apparition that portends one's own death, but its form has mutated over time to include the notion of double identity. The series is a “restaged” portrait-(re)documentation of three pop icons, each filmed with the equipment available for recording when the musicians were alive/active, with Bradley’s own double performing.

Susan Philipz (UK) works with sound. Susan Philipsz's work deals with a particular set of relationships
between sound, space and subjectivity. She expresses a keen interest in
what she terms 'the emotive and psychological properties of sound', more
specifically in popular music's function as a trigger for personal
memory. For the power of popular song, especially its staying power,
depends equally on its communal appeal and its ability to evoke quite
idiosyncratic associations. The principal tools Philipsz employs in her
delicate negotiations between shared experience and private
introspection are a fine but endearingly fallible singing voice and a
keen attentiveness to performative context, architectural setting and
social space. Philipsz will be showing “Something Better Change” from 2006.

Anselm Reyle’s (DE) paintings, material pictures, sculptures and ready-made objects out of everyday articles (again and again lamps and vases, but also articles from a non-domestic environment) and his installations composed from all these work elements remind the viewer at first of the whole art-historical repertoire for inventing abstract images: of the seductive machinery of the Pop and art print culture, just as much as of the good taste of modernism that has been domesticated into an everyday design that, now together with clever lighting solutions, is extolled in magazines for interior decoration. Reyle participates with two older works.

Jakob Rød (DK). The motives have an ambiguous role on the painting’s surface. They are lige elements in an abstract composition and function within an aesthetic framework. At the same time the motives point out of the frame and refer to the surrounding reality. Different possibilities are experimented with. The same composition can be repeated with different motives and the other way round. For example three packs of cigarette paper in different colors are painted on a white canvas. Thereafter the same composition is repeated but with three packs of chewing gum. Rød presents ”YOU’RE A STAR”

Anja Scwörer (DK) is a german artist educated at the academy in Karlsruhe. She works with batik, dying the material she wishes to work on. The batik has a arbitrary way of working – you never know quite how the outcome will be. When the fabric is ready Schwörer applies, often just one color in what appaers to be a mixture of a geometrical pattern and op art. The effect of the meeting between the random and the stilistic pattern applied amount to what can be compared to a piece of music.

Scwörer presents one work at Boisterous!.

Gert & Uwe Tobias (RO) will participate with two new ceramic works for the show. The twins work within different media fra woodcuts to sculpture and also their so-called typewriter drwings, where small apocalyptic drawings are written on a typewriter. The works can be described as demanding a long process. The motives have like the media a wide variety often with a gloomy and ironic character. The half drunk Count Dracula or the skull with the inscription ”The Devil is not Mocked.”

Boisterous! is curated by Kristina Valberg in cooperation with Claus Andersen.