Nicolai Wallner

Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen, Denmark

Maura Biava’s show ‘Medusa & Delfina’ deals with the portrayal of two female characters: the vague, sleepy Medusa and the active, changeable Delfina. The story of the Neapolitan Delfina is depicted in a frieze of drawings running continuously at eye level around the walls of the main room. The unframed drawings are on white paper and almost merge with the walls. Each picture contains a simple drawing of the character and a time of day written in the corner. The clarity and sparsity of the drawings is a mix between Byzantine church fresco and contemporary Japanese comic strip. Through her clothing and accessories it’s possible to follow the fictitious life of Delfina, with each drawing referring to a particular action. These little episodes traverse their individual micro-perspectives, mapping out the story of Delfina from ages 14 to 21. The pose of the figure changes with consecutive years, and each day different acts are performed.

In one drawing we see her go shopping at 10 am. But at 3.30 pm she’s trying to dress up like a tree. She’s 15 years old but, from her ring, we can tell that she’s already engaged (they marry young in Naples). On another day, at 9 am, she’s wearing an elegant suit, her lips are painted red, and she carries what might be a portable computer. In the later pictures, Delfina is around 20 years old and no longer married. At a previous point in the frieze, we have seen her on the point of swallowing her wedding ring, which she holds between her lips. Her look is straight and refractory and she is dressed like a hippie, with a band around her waist and a garland of flowers around her neck. She wants to break out, be free and get back to basics. Later, she is depicted in a karate outfit (she’s learning self defence) and next she becomes politically active (she wants to write graffiti on the walls). But then her pose changes: it’s another year and she wears smart, stylish clothes, trying to be correct and behave properly. And so the story continues, without really being a story. The drawings seem to be descriptive rather than narrative, and the development, if there is one, isn’t logical. In fact, you get the impression that it’s not a story of a single person ­ just changes of attitude, or indications of possible identities.

The story of Medusa is told in an installation in a smaller room. Medusa has chosen to sleep for a few years. She floats in water or air, has no narrative and remains passive. In this she is the opposite of Delfina, the ever changeable personality. The room contains a little bed with a transparent blue-green cover and printed photos of Medusa floating around in the sea or resting her head on a stone pillow. The actual pillow in the installation is a helium-filled balloon hovering in the room. It looks strange and undefined, but evokes perfectly the image of Medusa. Her presence is fragile, and the objects describing her seem to be out of shape: the bed is too small for a real person to sleep in, the cover doesn’t cover anything and the pillow can’t be kept down. Though Medusa doesn’t correspond directly to the figure of Greek mythology (in the drawings she wears a night-cap so you can’t see if her hair is made of snakes), she is still more abstract and timeless than Delfina, whom we know is from Naples and whose story is told through her actions.

Delfina is all over the room. She is so much ‘there’ that it is almost impossible to get a grip on exactly who she is. The various attitudes represented by the drawings call attention to the multiplicity of one person’s character and evoke an impression of complexity and flexibility. The necessity for a chameleon-like existence is thrown into relief by the feeling that this metamorphosis may go on and on, the character continually changing costumes and accessories like a cut-out doll. As in a comic strip, everything seems simple and easy to change, but real life is not as easy as turning the page. Still, in the course of a day, we all change our behaviour to adjust to the context we’re in. Character is manifold and changeable ­ always a work in progress.

In the frieze of drawings of Delfina, Biava focuses on this aspect of changeability and fickleness. She engages herself in the structuring of a personality. The attitude of ‘being in doing’ seems to be something that she sympathises with: there’s no implicit comment and no opposition. Biava just depicts and describes, utilising her own current experiences.

Line R. Nissen

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The five photos in Vibeke Tandberg’s ‘Line’ series (1999) merge Tandberg’s facial features - nose, mouth and the area around her eyes - with those of her friend Line. In the Platonic sense of the expression, Vibeke is in love with Line. Combined, Vibeke/Line gazes at the viewer with an assertive blue gaze from beneath dark eyebrows, pale-skinned and fragile in a flirtatious, ‘girlish’ way and dressed in a creased white top. The drapery of towels, the suggestions of a ‘do not disturb’ sign and a white door frame intimate the generic space of a hotel room, but is in fact Line’s home.

Tandberg’s exploration of the way desire is exchanged makes the project more interesting than simply a questioning of how much of the photograph is Line and how much is Vibeke. A conceptual space between the two women unfolds in a photographic fantasy. The libidinal wild card of being in love absorbs the love object’s personality. Tandberg’s admiration and longing for Line goes one better than Eros in violating and subsuming the desired person. In a previous series ‘Faces’ (1998), Tandberg portrayed personality via the people who come and go in one’s life. She mixed her acquaintances’ faces with her own, without revealing which one was ‘Vibeke’. With ‘Line’, the merging of personae is more aligned with a therapeutic acceptance of repressed elements in the psyche. The biographic fissure that runs through ‘Line’ is worked through to become the tomb of a specific desire. Each photograph lays bare aspects of this desire’s direction and dynamics. The clichéd sexiness of Line/Vibeke’s postures only underscores Tandberg’s five repetitious stabs at her own desire. In ‘Line’ the photographic merging reflects the artist’s conquest of desire and temporary ego loss, her split personality healed in chaste, almost painterly, monumental photography.

In this post-Sherman era of staged photography, Tandberg is on a quest for latent psychic material, without neccesarily operating within high, post-Modernist parameters of identity, representation and gender. If Sherman belongs to the first generation of American artists who grew up with TV then Tandberg belongs to the generation for whom TV’s endless repertoire of cultural images is no longer as promiscuous and threatening. Rather than portraying an authentic self caught up in a repertoire of simulacra, she deals with the slippage between me and you, privileging intimacy as an evolutionary hot-house for identity’s deviations. ‘Line’ is a rendition of what discreet psychodramas are enacted when you live under the same roof as your desire.

Lars Bang Larsen

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Galerie Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen, Denmark

Before entering the gallery, most of the visitors on the opening night knew more or less what they were going to see. And there it was, in the first room to your right, on the back wall: a row of black capital letters spelling out the word ‘DANMARK’ (Danmark, Denmark, 2005) at eye-level, more than a metre high and almost covering a seven-metre-long wall.
The letters had the same effect a mirror would have had; after you’ve taken a look at yourself, adjusted your clothes, given yourself a flattering or disparaging remark on your appearance, you rapidly direct your gaze at something else. You don’t want to appear vain. When another visitor entered the room and I could see that the work triggered the same reaction, I was convinced: had Jens Haaning made this work, say, seven years ago, it would not have received much attention. This must be a potent moment to write ‘DANMARK’ on a wall. Come to think of it, I can’t think of a more poignant one. The once relaxed, liberal country where there was always time for another beer is gone; in its place is a neo-liberal state where a relaxed approach to life is considered bad for economic productivity. In 2004 Haaning wrote ‘Deutschland’ on the wall of a barn in the small town of Tewel-Moor in Germany (Deutschland, Germany, 2004). Although the strategy here is the same, the works trigger different reactions based on the respective countries’ relationship to history. Germany’s name automatically conjures up the past; in the case of Denmark the associations are more connected to the here and now.
Like much of Haaning’s work, ‘DANMARK’ can be labelled ‘political’, but not in the sense that it involves a direct statement, opinion or critique; the artist is not addressing us directly or trying to argue a case. Looking at the name of my country in front of me, I am unsure whether I am communicating with the artist or with myself. Haaning confronts me with myself and the country where I live, but he is open to rejection and misreading, and to the use of context to create tension within the work. If, say, he had written ‘DANMARK’ on the wall of a more ‘activist’ art space, it would have been a fairly simple gesture gathering support on behalf of an assumed shared political position. Here he has trapped us in our own good behaviour; since this is no political rally but a successful commercial gallery, our opinions are less likely to be commonly held. The experience at Galerie Nicolai Wallner reminded me of Haaning’s work Trap (1994), in which the door closed behind you for 45 seconds after you entered the room. Only this time the claustrophobia was of another kind – that of a clinical environment where viewers are reduced to subjects to be observed as they responded to the stimuli of ‘DANMARK’.

Staffan Boije af Gennas

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Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen, Denmark

The five colour photographs that make up one half of ‘Morning of the Magicians’ (2005) look rather overexposed; the five black and white ones less so; the effect is as if the branches of the bushes surrounding the decaying Mediterranean house shown in the photographs were growing into the gallery space and scratching my eyes. Joachim Koester’s ten photographs depict the villa’s exterior and interior. In one of them the following words can be seen, scribbled onto a wall: ‘Stab your demoniac Smile to my brain Soak me in Cognac and Cocaine!’

A three-page text by the artist accom-panying the photographs tells how, in 1920, Aleister Crowley and his group of druggy, sexually experimental followers turned this Sicilian house into an ‘abbey’ for their occult practices. In addition to the Crowley story, the text is also informative about the modern history of occultism in general, and about others who, before Koester, had taken an interest in this house, such as the American sexologist Alfred Charles Kinsey. If you had read about this place in your own ‘experimental’ days, seeing it now, maybe for the first time, might arouse some excitement – except that the austerity of the images militates against any emotion. They are ‘objective’, like forensic photographs of a crime scene – but without a crime.

A similar atmosphere could be found in the images comprising ‘The Kant Walks’ (2005). The text next to the photographs was filled with anecdotes of the nightmares that haunted the ageing Immanuel Kant, and of how Koester got help from an elderly professor in trying to recreate the route the philosopher had taken on his daily stroll through Königsberg. By contrast, the seven resulting photographs mostly depict unpopulated, drab buildings ranging from garages to Soviet-style housing blocks.

There are no people in any of the pictures, which adds to the feeling of emptiness. Koester’s ‘Message from Andrée’ (at the Danish Pavilion, Venice, 2005), has a similar effect. In reproductions of the original photos on which that work was based – which were found in the ice 33 years after the Swedish scientist Salomon August Andrée went missing during a balloon expedition to the North Pole in 1897 – the frost stains on the negatives, having been left in the frozen camera for so long, are usually retouched out. Koester does the opposite: he keeps the stains and removes the subjects. You could laugh it off as a conceptual pun, but the artist has a more serious purpose in mind. The technical overexposure of and the lack of any people in the images places them in a sort of parenthesis. Many felt almost like photographs of other photographs. In one series of work on display, ‘histories’ (2003–5), Koester had actually re-photographed pages from a book containing photos taken by Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, and juxtaposed them with his own pictures of the same locations taken about 30 years later – an attempt to materialize the passing of time.

Koester’s interest in literary references is most overt in ‘From the Travels of Jonathan Harker’ (2003) photographs of the Borgo Pass in Romania, which the hero of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) crosses, pursued by wolves. In the accompanying text we learn that Koester’s interest in the place was fostered not least by the fact that Stoker had never been there himself. Seeing grey Transylvanian mountainsides as photographed by the artist is frustrating. To get anything out of the images you have to join in the game played out between them and the accompanying text: a combination of pictures and words that risks being not that different from what you might find in a guidebook. To enjoy these works fully, you possibly need to be an obsessive bibliophile. But you do get a sense of how Koester enjoys producing them – visiting the venues of fascinating stories, taking photographs, absorbing the setting and allowing his writing to mingle with that of Bertolt Brecht (‘The Brecht House’, 2004), Crowley, Kant and Stoker.

Staffan Boije af Gennäs

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Jeppe Hein

Interactive is a worrying word. It’s often lumped together with other vague and dubious concepts such as ‘multi-media’ or, even worse, ‘web’ art and its insistence that you should actually participate is presumptuous - often the last thing you want to do in a gallery is join in. Almost all of Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s sculptures and installations could be called interactive, but they do so in such a cunningly passive-aggressive manner that they draw you in unawares.

Take for instance 360º Presence (2002), a seemingly unassuming sculpture that was the cause of quite a commotion, as well as considerable physical damage, during its six-week run in a Berlin gallery. A plain steel sphere about a foot in diameter, it sits quietly on the gallery floor until you enter the room, when it begins to roll across the space. Gathering momentum, it starts to hurtle around uncontrollably until colliding with something (a wall, a door, someone’s legs), pausing for a moment and then trundling off in another direction. Although it did succeed in destroying practically everything below shin height in Johann König’s brand new gallery, its destructive tendencies are more accidental than malevolent, like those of a hyperactive toddler or an overexcited puppy. As this is an ‘interactive’ sculpture, however, whose odyssey of destruction was initiated by your arrival, you are to a large extent responsible; the reluctant minder of an unruly creature. It is hard to maintain a critical detachment towards an object that threatens to bruise your kneecaps and blames you for it too; and even harder to consider the intention of the artist when it seems to have a quite independent intention of its own. The object is animated with a mobile spirit that seems to usurp the artist’s will and remove him from the equation, leaving nothing in the way of the one-on-one relationship with the spectator that it insists on.

Many of Hein’s works rely on the unexpected mobility of an inanimate object for their disarming effect. 360º Presence is no exception; it is controlled by a sophisticated system of sensors that detect external movement and instigate its own internal motion. But unlike Olafur Eliasson (an influence Hein is quick to acknowledge), who leaves the mechanics of his man-made spectacles visible, Hein ensures that the mechanisms controlling his works are always hidden. Their motion seems as simple and obvious as that of a mobile blown by the wind, though here the activating force is a human presence. The works can be subtle, as in Let Me Show You the World (2000), a tiny hole in a wall which invites you to peer into it; when you do so, a soft breeze flutters your eyelashes, like a whispered secret. Or they can be beautifully childish, like Space in Action / Action in Space (2002), a fountain consisting of a circular wall of water, one section of which shuts off abruptly when you approach, inviting you to enter the ‘room’ inside (once you enter, the water wall shoots back up and you seem trapped, until you notice that the mechanism works the other way round as well). Or bombastic, like Bear the Consequences (2003), where your entrance into the gallery is greeted with flames bursting from the opposite wall, that get bigger and hotter the closer you get. As compelling as a circus fire-breather, it is an awesome sight laced with enough danger to make the hairs on your arm stand on end. In both cases the gadgetry, whether a simple rotary fan suspended at eye level, blowing cool air through the hole, or the complicated machinery needed to produce a billowing flame that anticipates your presence, is concealed behind a fake wall. The end result is mysterious, seductive and seems to speak to you directly with a disarming frankness.

Many of the most effective visual gags and simple spectacles have their roots in the circus or the fun house, and Hein takes his cue from both. The difference is that his audience don’t know what they’ve got coming to them. His works appear modest, using clear forms such as the sphere; they can be unassuming to the point of near invisibility, like the small hole in the otherwise empty wall, or else they are totally disguised. You would be hard pressed, for example, to identify the work by Hein in a room full of On Kawara date paintings at the MMK in Frankfurt. That is, until you sit on the bench in the middle of the room and it takes off beneath you (Moving Bench #2, 2002). A simple clownish trick, it shatters any contemplative calm the Kawaras may have inspired. Knowing what is going to happen, it is tempting to wait for the next unsuspecting participant.

Hein brought a similarly mischievous spirit into Nicolai Wallner’s Copenhagen gallery for his first solo show there. The gallery itself was completely empty, but if you stayed around long enough, you might have realized that one of the walls was moving, silently creeping forwards until the room was just two metres wide (Changing Space, 2003). A look in the back office would show you a gorgeous globe lit up in coloured neon, but when you entered the room it went out and was left looking grey and uninspiring (No Presence, 2003). Of course, once you left, it lit up again. Here, like Elmgreen & Dragset, Hein refuses to give us anything extraneous to look at, using the structures of the ‘white cube’ itself as his raw material and mocking our passive acceptance of their neutral presence. He animates them, literally, with a cheeky kinetic spirit, making the walls creep up on you while the sculptures show off when your back is turned: ‘He’s behind you!’ This is institutional critique, pantomime style.

Hein’s light-hearted interventions may startle with their intimacy, or tease with a hint of danger; they may throw into doubt the fixed nature of the institutional architecture we take for granted, but they do not threaten to topple these edifices or burn down the gallery (although it might be interesting to see the burning flame piece installed in the room full of On Kawaras). Instead, they build on the accepted patterns of our behaviour, playing with the unspoken boundaries that dictate the proper distance between artwork and audience and challenging the quick run-in, run-out approach of many a gallery-goer. As tired as it may sound, Hein does seek to reactivate the viewing experience, jolting the spectator out of complacent assumptions by enabling the art object to answer back, so to speak, or even to initiate the conversation, so that the appropriate response is the cartoon double take. Reversing the theme of Toy Story (1995), where the toys only come to life when the humans aren’t watching, here the artworks are animated by and reliant on the audience’s absolute attention. Passivity is not an option for Hein’s audience, as the work demands a response. As he says: ‘I want to show that the work isn’t anything on its own, it’s only what the public informs it with.’

A series of works using highly polished steel spheres are like the polite, well-groomed cousins of Hein’s 360º Presence. Like Robert Morris’ Mirrored Cubes (1965), they are almost invisible, disappearing beneath their own reflective surfaces, but whereas Morris’ cubes dissect the space into geometric fragments of floor and wall, these distorting mirror balls melt the walls, floor and ceiling into one continuous surface, rounding off the corners of the white cube. The environment is further destabilized by the balls’ constant motion as they roll around ponderously, presenting ever new views while you, the spectator, are reflected always centre frame within the seamless gallery space.

A group of seven such spheres entitled Continuity Reflecting Space (2003), shown in the foyer of La Caixa in Barcelona, mirrors its audience not only literally but also metaphorically. When the museum opens, the balls cling together tentatively in the centre of the foyer, but throughout the course of the day they begin to wander off on their own, bumbling between bookshop and information desk in a comic analogy of the museum visitors’ own indecision. Although undeniably attractive, the significance of these shiny objects lies more in their provoking a re-evaluation of the complex web of connections that occurs within the museum space: not only between spectator and artwork but also between one artwork and another (each sphere contains the reflection of magnificent works by Lucio Fontana and Sol LeWitt that also hang in the foyer), or even one spectator and another. Encouraged by the endearing anthropomorphism of the inanimate object made mobile, we may talk to strangers in the gallery, ask questions, make friends. Perhaps rather than calling them ‘interactive’, it would be more accurate to refer to these as genuinely ‘social sculptures’, even if a piece such as Sving (2003) - a porch swing that swings not just back and forth but all the way round in endless, frantically fast revolutions - would make any physical engagement with it a breakneck endeavour. Hein’s works are charming and, if demanding, are entertaining in return. They recharge the social aspect of the art experience, reminding us that all art is, in fact, interactive and asks for a direct engagement that may be intimidating or even embarrassing, but is very often worth it. So go on, join in.

Kirsty Bell

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Road Sign with the Distance to Afghanistan Placed on the Side of a Road outside Utrecht.

Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner

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Jonathan Monk
A Stationary Metamorphosis within a Geometric Figure
(Pyramid)
2008

Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner

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When I saw these door designs by Nicolai Wallner I didn’t know what to say exactly, I was just really amazed, and I can say that the pictures made me smile. Just try to imagine how your friends, or anybody would react when they’ll see a door like this …. WTF !!

Galleri Nicolai Wallner is a contemporary art gallery, which exhibits innovative Scandinavian and international art. Since 1993 Gallery Nicolai Wallner has been one of the leading young galleries on the contemporary art scene. Galleri Nicolai Wallner has adhered the highest standards of connoisseurship and has achieved an international reputation for presenting some of the most challenging contemporary artists.

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It is a great pleasure for Galleri Nicolai Wallner to present our 15year anniversary exhibition with new works by the artists of the gallery.

Galleri Nicolai Wallner opened in the fall of 1993 with a selection of artists that includes the majority of our program today. As such, the inauguration of the gallery not only captured the spirit of that particular time but also sets the pace and agenda for what we do today.

The gallery works with a diverse group of artists all working in different media. Accordingly, the artists are defined as a group not as much by a shared aesthetic but more by a common wish to express a content, tell a story and set a mark in an otherwise fluctuating world. Even though the gallery has primarily been built on the ideals of what it means to represent a specific generation of artists over a very long period of time, we have also in several instances shown works by older, more established artists. This has been done not only to contextualise our program but also to introduce the Danish art scene to some of the most seminal artists of latter half of the 20th century.

We see the responsibility of the gallery as wide reaching; a personal collaboration with each artist, helping with production and acting as their connection to international galleries and museums, also managing both a written and a visual archive for each artist, and not at least acting as an open public space that presents the highest level of contemporary art to the general public. During the years we have also published prints and catalogues with several of our artists.

Much like our artists, Galleri Nicolai Wallner has experienced an extraordinary development. In 1999, the gallery moved from its city location to Islandsbrygge, a then rundown area of Copenhagen that has now become centre of contemporary art in Scandinavia. The move meant a vast increase in our gallery space and now allows us to mount two independent, full-scale exhibitions simultaneously.

We look forward to welcome you in the gallery.

With kind regards,

Nicolai Wallner

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It is a great pleasure for Galleri Nicolai Wallner to present Black Paintings, an exhibition with new works by Glenn Sorensen.

Glenn Sorensen finds his motifs in his direct personal environment; two people standing on the beach or an empty can holding a flower.
The figures in the paintings are often placed slightly off centre, half cut off by the edge of the canvas, giving the works an immediacy of a snapshot or a quick glance. Often repeating the same scene more than once, seeing it from different angles or making minute changes, the artist seem to have an almost meditative approach to painting. Sorensen works figuratively but also pushes his images towards a two-dimensional abstraction. Shapes are slightly blurred as if moving in front of your eyes and a real sense of perspective is distorted by the empty space the figures seemingly inhabit.

The colors employed are dreamy and drowsy, rendered in lush shades of lavender, pink and light turquoise on a dark background that drains the vitality of the delicate figures set against it. The contrast between light and darkness creates unnatural phosphorescence, a peculiar, sleepy way of seeing the world. This look is only further enhanced by the blissful domesticity of the motifs. Like the opaque remnants of a dream they play with your senses and linger in your mind long after you have experienced them.

A feeling of weariness marks this series of portraits and household still-lives. A certain melancholy that is reflected in the various titles with which Sorensen describes his work; Sick, Dented and Waiting. Also in the actual size of the paintings the artist steers away from the grandiose. Instead the works appear small and intimate as they hang sparingly in the white gallery space. They resemble small windows or perhaps even exclamation marks as the rigorousness of the composition and the consistent use of the same colors somehow seem to belie any reading of the works that focus on their smallness and delicacy. It looks like the artist has managed to find strength in weakness, giving his paintings a mysterious aura that inevitably attracts the attention of the viewer.

We are happy to welcome you in the gallery.

With kind regards

Galleri Nicolai Wallner

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