From Eternity to Here

Peter Feiler (DE), Artists Anonymous (DE), Gordon Cheung (UK), Sigga Björg Sigurdardottir (IS) and Emeli Theander (SE)

Group show from 12/03/2011 to 30/04/2011
Opening reception Friday 11th March 2011 from 5 – 8 pm

PRESS RELEASE:

LARMgalleri proudly presents the exhibition From Eternity to Here showing works by four different artists and one artists’ group. Their practices, as well as their backgrounds, are vide ranging working in different media such as painting, photography, drawing, street art and video and mixing these media. They furthermore mix different stylistic genres in an eclectic manner reflecting on the desires and dreams of human beings in today’s society. The artists explore topics such as social and personal conflicts, life and death, and faith and despair. Their works are morbid, bizarre, provocative, and ironic, and there are numerous references to different art historical styles and periods. Put in the hands of these young artists these references become renegotiated, redefined and put in a new context and one can almost say that their works of art span from eternity to here.

Peter Feiler builds up a utopian universe wherein human figures torture, murder and rape each other. Renaissance copper engravings by artists such as Albrecht Dürer comes to mind. In his own words, Feiler shows “what men can do to one another” in a complex narration, where no leading threads are given. Feiler is not the big preacher of moral, but he wants us to open up our eyes to the world we take part in; a world in which we sometimes seem to have become numb to images of war and other cruelties due to the massive bombardment from the mass media. Feiler’s works are open narrations spun from isolated fragments and allusions to form dazzling and chaotic patterns that gives birth to a painting monumental not as much in size but in content.

The Berlin artists’ group, Artists Anonymous, founded in 2001, bring two oppositional genres, painting and photography, closer together by working with what they call “afterimages”. Technically, Artists Anonymous achieve a unification of the positive/negative binary by beginning with a painting rendered in a negative palette. The painting is then photographed and its negative image transferred to a positive slide, which is then printed on negative photographic paper, inverting both the colours and the composition to their positive conclusion. In this case, the positive subject, a “negative” painting, reveals its opposite when exposed by analog photography, resulting in the inverted, hence “positive,” photograph. The high status of the original is questioned as well as that of the artist as a genius pouring his own life into his works. On the contrary these artists are not present in their works why they are artists anonymous.

Gordon Cheung works in several media and draw from a diversity of historical precedents—applying techniques as distinct as collage, Chinese and Japanese ink brush work, photographic transfer of appropriated imagery, and spray paint. His bright, artificial colours on a dark background feels like stepping into some one’s acid hallucination in which recognisable motives, such as a scene from the wild west, become part of a psychedelic dream. Space expands and contracts as if on the verge of collapse and time seems to reach toward the future while remaining firmly rooted in the past.

Sigga Björg Sigurdardottir unfolds a universe of strange, misshaped creatures that seem to have crawled out of some ones dark mind or nightmares. The creatures look like people or animals, but they do not have to be either. They simply exist to demonstrate a situation or a state of mind. The works depicts a visualisation of different moods, such as sadness, anger, and joy, which are familiar to most human beings. Everyone knows how it feels like to have a dark cloud hanging over our heads, and this becomes literal in Sigurdardottir’s works. Despite the negative feelings, there is always something warm and familiar in her works such as the thick, stripped socks that some of these mystical beings are wearing. The references to Sigurdardottir’s Icelandic background with a close connection to the Icelandic mythology seems noticeable in her works, where a simple narration takes place between the dark, furry creatures showing human behaviour and thereby expressing human feelings.

In the Swedish artist Emeli Theander’s paintings and drawings we enter a dark universe of unease, similar to that of the newer cult movie Donni Darko(2001), where a dark, tall rabbit-dressed person hunts a young man’s mind. Something is wrong and something scary is lurking around the corner. Theander’s works are full of ghosts that become metaphors and mediators between the realm of the real and the imagined or even for the space “in-between” they inhabit. The ghosts often take the shapes of little girls or young women that are directed towards the viewer. Theander thereby combines the unpleasant with something sweet and innocent which makes the unease even bigger, but strangely enough, at the same time brighter, just as the figures themselves.