Moving Like An Antique Lizard - Surrounded by Shifting Shapes (044)

Andersen’s Contemporary is proud to present Anna Fro Vodder’s solo exhibition Moving like an antique lizard – surrounded by shifting shapes – an exhibition in which Vodder deliberately works with the abstract language in contrast to the recognizable. Just as a lizard can physically transform – it can shed its tail, change, and regenerate its form – Vodder’s choice of materials and the associations emerging from her compositions hold the potential for change and transformation. The exhibition explores the abstract space in relation to the idea of a body. Quite literally, both a trivet and a woven basket have been cut open, modified, and subjected to Vodder’s pictorial composition. Thus transformed into elements on the picture plane, into fragments and branches, stripped of their original form and function, the materials take on a new body, becoming line drawings within the image. A recurring theme throughout the exhibition is an engagement with picture planes and spaces that intersect and intertwine. In Girl Scout Trick (we have summer camp here), star-like shapes collide edge to edge in dense, compacted spaces. The title suggests both a territorial marker and, at the same time, the image reflects a human form of navigation – a journey through an uncertain, abstract space. In several works, strings of pearls have been broken apart, with the beads scattered across the surface of the image. The pearls appear as though they were waves of paint splatters on a canvas, fragments of a celestial body, a sea of particles. In Handmade Monocle, a figure appears – a monocle – which, however, cannot be used in any practical sense. According to the artist, it functions as a visual fixation point, an entryway that can open up an alternative vision, an imaginary picture plane. In the works Growing things, pictorial fragments and motifs from natural history appear. In the piece titled Museum, a dinosaur skeleton is exhibited in a museum. On a smaller panel: the pattern of a peacock’s fanned tail feathers, an image of a clay dish being glazed – all organic structures and patterns, either in the process of being built up – or broken down? Elastic entities, the joints of skeletons, mutable forms that refer back to the very process of artistic creation. At Anna Fro Vodder’s solo exhibition in Copenhagen in 2011, she presented works under the title Restless Confetti. The works in this current exhibition seem like a continuation of that trajectory – the journey continues, materials are stirred up, shifted around, and arranged in new frameworks.