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On this day in
1832 was born Paul Gustave Doré, French artist, engraver, and illustrator.
1872 Russian pianist and composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was born
1993 died Rudolf Nureyev , one of the greatest male ballet dancers of the 20th century
2004 died Francesco Scavullo, American photographer best known for his celebrity portraits. |
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Andreas Ericksson en el Mumok
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| Thursday, November 13, 2008 |
With the exhibition walking the dog – lying on the sofa the MUMOK is presenting over 30 paintings, photographs and sculptures by the young Swedish artist Andreas Eriksson, born in 1975 in Björsäter, who received the prestigious 2007 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. As with the preceding prize-winners, Ryan Gander (2005) and Keren Cytter (2006), the Swiss Bâloise Group made the museum a gift of the artist’s prize-winning work.
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Andreas Eriksson "A Second Time", 2007 Bronzeskulptur, zweiteilig / bronze sculpture, two parts 130 x 100 x 100 cm MUMOK Wien, Schenkung der Bâloise-Gruppe Courtesy Galleri Riis, Oslo
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Andreas Eriksson’s work is fascinating in its apparently outmoded- and thus new - approach. In a clamorous art business which is hungry for sensation his works are touching as a quietly poetic antipole. The starting point and content of his art is the experience of nature which he reacts to with sensitivity and into which he projects his own notions. After decades in which art has mainly been informed by critical/analytical and deconstructive positions, his approach is much more determined by experiential possibilities - such as empathy, emotion and introspection - that have long been assigned to the background and, in many respects, even deprecated.
Since 2001 Eriksson, who is primarily a painter, has extended the spectrum of his artistic mediums. He captures the impressions of his daily walks - walking the dog - in photographs. However, in the medium of paint he develops what are usually quiet and largely abstract pictures. Photographs and paintings are often combined into multi-part works in which the images that have been created by differing means enter into a dialogue with each other.
Andreas Eriksson "Diptychon / Diptych", 2008 Farbfoto, Öl und Acryl auf Aluminium / C-print, oil and acrylic on aluminium Courtesy Galleri Riis, Oslo Foto / Photo: MUMOK/Lena Deinhardstein
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Eriksson’s shadow pictures are based on photographic images that he makes, in the evening lying on the sofa – the lights from passing cars on his living room walls. The forms of these shadows are transferred to the canvas using pure pigment without any binder and the entire picture is then overpainted in monochrome. The free pigment dissolves in the process and thus the forms of the shadows reappear in the surface layer of paint, even if only delicately and vaguely – the memory of an ephemeral experience.
Eriksson’s sculptures are based on casts of natural objects through which he creates his poetic metaphors of becoming and decay which are symbolic for how he understands his work as an artist. The works in the series being shown in Vienna, Content is a Glimpse, are based on casts from dead birds that the artist found after they had flown against the windows of his studio. For him their fate is a metaphor for the painter’s dilemma: the birds died because they believed in an illusion. Eriksson had them cast in such a way that the bizarre forms of the casting channels were also preserved and thus that it appears that they once again are sitting on branches.
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Andreas Eriksson "Szene und grünes Monochrome / Scene and Green Monochrome", 2008 Farbfoto und Öl auf Aluminium / C-print and oil on aluminium Courtesy Galleri Riis, Oslo Foto / Photo: MUMOK/Lena Deinhardstein © VBK Wien, 2008 |
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In the work A Second Time the artist “reconstructs” nature in a sense. He cut a tree into small pieces and constructed a new tree from those, casting the whole in bronze. Thus the tree is recreated in two smaller versions as if it had been cloned which, although they are not identical, look very similar.
Further Information
Walking the dog - Lying on the sofa |
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