Christian Andersson @ Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Christian Andersson
"Put the Cobwebs Back in Place"
Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
Through July 30th, 2016

In his exhibition Put the Cobwebs Back in Place, CHRISTIAN ANDERSSON works unfold a complex network of metaphysical speculations exploring and questioning our seemingly given reality. His multimedia works draw references from diverse fields such as science and science fiction, the history of art and popular culture as well as the canon of western civilisation. His practice is deeply rooted in the legacy of surrealism and a firm trust in a mysterious, hidden aspect of life.

In the first room we are confronted with skilfully crafted wooden objects of a complex nature. For the funnel-shaped objects titled Now Wait for Last Year Christian Andersson worked with a woodturner to excavate the annual rings of 120-year old oak trees. Cutting progressively deeper from the bark to the trunk’s core and vice versa, every single annual ring is being revealed. Due to this process the rings become stretched in their width.

The presentation of the objects on a functional steel shelving system is reminiscent of how artefacts would be tucked away in a museum’s storage or how materials and tools are stored in a workshop. They remain oscillating between measuring tools or precious artefacts from the past. Smaller than table size these objects might also be seen as models of four-dimensional space-time curved by the presence of matter, for example a black hole, as described in the General Theory of Relativity. The work evokes the tradition of the Bicycle Wheel by the great doubter Marcel Duchamp. Not merely a ready made, it was an object of pseudoscientific speculation aiming at visualising the invisible fourth dimension (that —before Einstein—was conceived of as a dimension of space).

The installation Chroma Key Twine has a similar character as a model of thought. Conceptualising time and history as constructs subjected to mediation and debate, a green background paper woven into a grid and supported by two tripods fills the entire visual field of the viewer. The green screen, or chroma key technique is commonly used in film and TV productions to digitally insert virtual backgrounds, merging two images together. A powerful metaphor for our progressively dematerialised, mediated world the work offers an open space for projecting alternative, and in this case parallel, future realities.

In his installation One Day, which is on view behind a curtain in the back room, Christian Andersson gives us a glimpse of the deep personal shock that might be caused by the realisation of the fallibility of established truths about our reality. The installation uses light―an even with current knowledge still not fully explicable phenomena―as medium. Six gobo-lights, casually stored in a crate, seem to live a life of their own, projecting faint light in the shape of texts onto the ceiling and walls of the gallery. The words form the story of a macabre joke or a science-fiction nightmare.

From here the exhibition’s choreography leads back into the first room. Gazing (back) through the bronze-tinted curtain, the front room now appears distant, dreamlike and somewhat unfamiliar.

CHRISTIAN ANDERSSON, born 1973 in Stockholm, currently lives and works in Malmö.

He recently had solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Thun in 2015, as well as the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Moderna Museet, Malmö (both 2011). Lately, his work has been on view in group exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2016), Medizinhistorisches Museum, Berlin (2015), Magazin 4, Bregenz (2014), Matadero, Madrid and the 12th Biennale de Lyon (both 2013). Later this year, his works will be on view in group shows at the Boimans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam and the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik. He is currently working on an exhibition project in Le Havre curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler and a solo exhibition at CIAJG, Guimaraes in 2017. Put the Cobwebs Back in Place is his fifth exhibition with Galerie Nordenhake.

NORDENHAKE, Berlin & Stockholm
www.nordenhake.com

Christian Andersson at Galerie Nordenhake Berlin

Christian Andersson, 51 days in June
Galerie Nordenhake Berlin
June 11 - August 1, 2010

Galerie Nordenhake presents its second solo exhibition in Berlin with Swedish artist Christian Andersson. Using elements from the past as an anchor for his present production, Andersson explores questions of temporality, perception, visibility and representation. 

Upon entering the gallery, a slight and seemingly misplaced scent is detecrigged to an iron rod with copper wire. The contraption replicates what some believe to be an early electrochemical cell found in Baghdad, dating from the first centuries table. In Paper Clip (The Baghdad Batteries), 49 clay pots are filled with vinegar and A.D. (substantially earlier than Volta’s documented invention around 1800). The combination of copper and iron with the vinegar’s slight acidity produces an electrical magnet, a positive charge manifest only in the paperclip clinging to the top of the contraption’s iron rod.

In The Sistine Chapel (B.C.), the corner of a glass table is broken off and rearranged as a method of display, presenting a torqued comic strip that can only be read in the reflection on the table’s surface. In the short scene, two cavemen puzzlingly liken clouds to the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Temporal conflation and prehistory also play a role in a nearby photograph of colored flames burning like Molotov cocktails from chemistry bottles. In Untitled (Fire), a once indecipherable wonder has been translated into the familiar language of representation: the RGB color spectrum of electronic displays on televisions and computers. In his image, Andersson evokes ancient discoveries and modern man’s psychological and technical evolution, including color theory and color photography, a mode of representation that nears our perception of reality more effectively than its predecessors. 

Opposite the gallery’s main entrance hangs an image depicting a black and white photograph framed in slightly damaged glass. The photograph shows a wrapped sculpture suspended in the air, apparently mid-installation. Beneath the blankets and ropes, invisible to the viewer’s eye, is Georg Kolbe’s Alba (Morgen or Dawn), a bronze sculpture that was included in Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. The Pavilion, erected as a reception hall for the grand opening and a transitory passage for visitors to the fair, was lavishly constructed from onyx, travertine, glass and a variety of marble. Although it was dismantled shortly after the close of the exhibition, the influential building was reconstructed in the mid-1980s in its original location, along with a replica of Kolbe’s sculpture. In Andersson’s image, the hairline crack in the glass and the futile effort to conceal it with a second layer visualize unforeseen difficulties, an idea gone wrong. The hovering and unidentifiable creation of a German sculptor working in the ‘30s marks a moment of limbo and underscores the temporal lag between the original Pavilion and its subsequent restaging. 

The Barcelona Pavilion returns in the second gallery space with the installation are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era. Spanning the room is a photographic detail from the Pavilion’s onyx wall, a ready-made Rorschach test. The Pavilion’s temporal existence, prolonged by an unforeseen resurrection, is conjured by intervals of strobe flashes, backlighting the photograph and rendering unnoticed minutiae suddenly visible. The work’s palindrome title is both a complete sentence and a mirrored, incomplete fragment; it references the “era” of the 1930s (including the Barcelona Pavilion’s brief existence, the Weimar Republic’s decline and the rise of the Third Reich) while also posing a question that contains its own answer, reflected. The mixed temporalities occurring throughout 51 Days in June are literalized by the tricks and turns of are we not drawn onward’s title, the passage from past to present and back again. 

Christian Andersson was born in 1973 in Stockholm, and currently lives and works in Malmö. Recent solo exhibitions include “Landings 2” at Landings, Vestfossen, Norway (2010), "Three Steps to Rockefeller" at Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania (2009), "I Did It Just the Same”, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm (2008), Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2008), and "9 was 6 if", Studio A, Otterndorf (2005). Andersson has also participated in numerous group shows including the 1st Biennale for International Light Art, Ruhr (2010) and presentations at Centre d'art Passages, Troyes, France (2009), The Hessel Museum, New York (2009), Kunstverein Heidelberg, Germany (2007), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006), Swiss Institute, New York (2005), Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2005). In 2011 he will present a major solo exhibition at Moderna Museet, Malmö.

Galerie Nordenhake Berlin
Lindenstrasse 34
10969 Berlin
www.nordenhake.com
Tues-Sat 11 am - 6 pm