detourartipelag

[detourartipelag]

Fint blogg inlägg i fint höstljus från vår pågående skulpturutställning.

[detourartipelag]

A reflection on the Ulrika Sparre’s stones through the Alberto Giacometti’s eyes

…I knock at the stone's front door.  "It's only me, let me come in. I haven't got two thousand centuries, so let me come under your roof." "If you don't believe me," says the stone, "just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same. Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said. And, finally, ask a hair from your own head. I am bursting from laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter, although I don't know how to laugh." I knock at the stone's front door. "It's only me, let me come in. "I don't have a door," says the stone.                            

                     (From “A Conversation with a stone”, Wislawa Szymborska)

Ulrika Sparre connects art and life together in favour of a religion of the heartas the Society of the Sensitives used to do. The members of that society exchanged sensitive words during long walks looking forward to the large rock, servings as the community’s sanctuary.

According to this tradition, she builds souls’ traces around the soil looking for new ways her artworks can relate to nature.

During my trip to the wonderful Bregaglia valley, I had the opportunity to visit the golden monolith that fascinated Giacometti. In his Writingshe says: “for at least two summers in a row, among everything that surrounded me, I could only see a huge stone which was 800 meters away from the village. It was a golden monolith at the entrance of a little cave. I felt full of joy when I could huddle up at the bottom of the little cave. All my wishes were fulfilled.”The monolith, that dominates the fascinating Stampa’s valley, is moulded by the time. It is possible to see internally the same sunken scars of the Giacometti’s sculptures.

As soon as I was in front of the Ulrika’s creations I immediately connected her stones’ shapes to this majestic Swiss monolith. In line with this feeling, their inspirations and works become part of the big world’s ley lines which are believed to have spiritual significance. Ley lines, as is defined by The Leyline Projectof Ulrika Sparre and Steingrimur Eyfjord, are manmade energy lines created by stone formations such as stone ships or other ancient archaelogical structures. The Leyline Projectactually examines the ancient phenomenon of ley lines and the research includes several aspects of earth energies.

According to this faith, I see a strong connection between Giacometti’s monolith, Sparre’s energetical research and Goethe’s Good Luck Stone. It is very interesting that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe erected a monument in the meadows along the River Ilm outside Weimar. The stone makesa cube, which is a solidity’s sign, with a sphere that belongs to the realm of instability. These two peculiarities shape a new solid monument of strength. Most likely, this sculpture was unknown to Alberto Giacometti, however the idea of the Giacometti’s egyptian pedestals is strikingly similar to Goethe’s base. From an historical point of view they are far apart, however they seem to share the same spiritual connection. The stone is something alive and immortal. It can be transformed, but it can not die.

The birth place of Alberto Giacometti is a small group of mostly granite mountains. There was a time whenhe was walking with Marx Ernst along the magnificent mountains upon Maloja, the two found some interesting natural stones. They were both astonished by this rocky power and realized that there is not any better sculpture than the one created by our earth, just like these small stones. For this very reason they painted the stones, making them vigorous new works of art.

In the same manner, Ulrika Sparre decides to adorn selected natural stones from Artipelag with signs. The works are called: Cosmic energy pillar, Labyrinth/Ley line, Female energy point, Hexagonal window andTrans-dimensional portal.The power of places, where she got inspiration, are now relocated with a new beam of energy. They are also associated with different sounds, which create a complex and unexplainable experience full of vibrations and images. Specifically, for the Female energy point, she refers to The Chalice Well, which is situated at the foot of Glastonbury Tor. The well itself is thought to have been built by the Druids, and that the water the gushes from it, reddish in colour and tasting of iron, has been claimed to have magical powers. For others with a more mystical, pagan outlook the waters are acknowledged as the essence of life, the gift from Mother Earth to sustain its living forms.

Regarding the Labyrinth, there is a connection with the one on Artipelag’s rooftop. Certainly, everything is related through the world’s empathy and the nature’s spirituality which is our life’s substance. In this sense, leylines are on sites where a lot of people’s thoughts and energies are directed.  

The nature is the main link between these two artists, who draw inspiration from rocks as a memory of their territory and feelings. As Alberto Giacometti has always been obsessed with the possible failure because he is aware of the conflict between reality and perception, Ulrika Sparre reflects on the possibility like a perception’s quality. In contrast with the failure of the artistic creation, they two artists admire the natural stones.

According to this obsession, the matter of the sculpture seems to burst forth from its inherent fessures. As the expansive power of Medardo Rosso’s Golden Age comes through, in Sparre’s stones I feel an intense and positive energy that spreads across the surrounding nature.

Virginia Marano 

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Ulrika Sparre connects art, spirituality and life. On the occasion of Detour she has decorated a selection of natural stones with signs that are associated with different sounds. The combination of signs and sounds creates a complex and inexplicable experience filled with vibrations and images.

Ulrika Sparre was born in Stockholm in 1974. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Sparre applies her artistic practice to multiple media creating installations, sculpture, photography, film, performance and sound art.Ulrika Sparre is represented by Stene Projects Gallery, Stockholm.

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The Cube and the Open. A dialogue between Per Kirkeby and Alberto Giacometti.

…The creature gazes into openness with all its eyes. But our eyes are as if they were reversed, and surround it, everywhere, like barriers against its free passage. We know what is outside us from the animal’s face alone: since we already turn the young child round and make it look backwards at what is settled, not that openness that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death. We alone see that: the free creature has its progress always behind it, and God before it, and when it moves, it moves in eternity, as streams do…

(From“The Eighth Elegy”, Rainer Maria Rilke)

Per Kirkeby is one of the most known artist in the Scandinavian art scene.

The sculpture showed at Artipelag is Stele.Thanks to its shape and spontaneous magnificence, it is properly referring to a tree or to a bronze monolith earthly devoted to nature.

It is remarkably close to the Cube’s shape of Alberto Giacometti. Kirkeby’s Stelesuits very well with the surrounding nature and the specific material refers further to indented shorelines. Related to the Giacometti’s Cube, there is an intimate mention of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I. Taking inspiration from the German engraver, the two sculptors made abstract works, which try to explain the invisible fascination with the unapproachable death’s meaning. Yves Bonnefoy writes: «There is no skull in Dürer’s Melancholia, although one might have been expected…but this great thing, blind as a stone, closed as a tomb…is surely the nearest thing to a death’s head, to a skull».

They are both linked with the Open. According to Rilke, the Open which differentiates the animal from the human is the space of wonder that makes the animal free. In fact, freedom consists in the distance from the feeling of death as temporal limit. The animal is moving in the eternity, while human by its very nature is given to death. This contrast is recognisable in life’s enigma and it is linked with the hermeneutical sense of existence. Heidegger says: «The open is the great whole of all that is unbounded... Where something is encountered, a barrier comes into being. Where there is confinement, whatever is so barred is forced back upon itself and thus bent in upon itself. The barring twists and blocks off the relation to the Open, and makes of the relation itself a twisted one».

Alberto Giacometti and Per Kirkeby, observing the objective world, attempt a reconstruction of the rapport between reality and perception by tackling the complex passage from the real world to its aesthetic counterpart. They two go through the art’s language to find a new spiritual and inner sense. The Kirkeby’s approach led him to the Informel,with which he shares an improvisatory and highly gestural technique. Subsequently, Stele gives us the idea of a figurative concept, but it comes from an abstract impulse.

Virginia Marano

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Klara Kristalova är en av samtidens internationellt största konstnärer inom keramik. I Detour visar vi tre verk, "Kanske allt hänger ihop här under", 2018, "Röse", 2011 och "Det som håller mig tillbaka, bär mig vidare", 2017 som alla blivit några av utställningens favoritverk hos er besökare. Här berättar hon mer om verken och om att ställa ut i skogen.

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Under sommaren kompletteras Artipelags pågående utställning "Bloomsbury Spirit" med ytterligare en konstupplevelse. Ta chansen att sondera den makalösa naturen kring Artipelag och samtidigt se konst av bland andra Charlotte Gyllenhammar, Klara Kristalova, Per Kirkeby, Ulrika Sparre och Jaume Plensa.

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“The souls’ roots” of Klara Kristalova and the “Absolute” of Alberto Giacometti

That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love; It is enough, the freight should be Proportioned to the groove.

(Emily Dickinson, n. 1765)

Klara Kristalova is one of the protagonists of Detourat Artipelag. Her art takes inspiration from Swedish myths and fairytales and the results are magic figures profoundly linked with the surrounded landscape. There is an echo of the noted John Bauer’s work Ännu sitter Tuvstarr kvar och ser ner i vattnet, from which we are immediately transported from the real world into a dreamlike settingfull of mistery and signs. Kristalova is a complete artist, that takes inspiration from the nature like a perfomer and transforms it into creation as sculptures through the psychological analysis of emotions and suggestions.

At Artipelag the sculpture will take on a life of its own.

What holds me back, carries me furtherof Kristalovais part of an idealistic narration and is not merely spacely embodied, but also earthly fixed.

The figure shows a girl who tries to escape without success. She is rooted, but not permanently. However she can be shifted anywhere, she belongs to a specific space. She could be a tree’s interpretation, referring to the energetical power of life itself. She is also a reference point for the radical shift from the childhood to the adulthood. In fact, the memory’s past is interwined with the dreaming future and the present’s belonging. She seems to be looking at the horizon, waiting for a ship or perhaps a miracle. Besides, the roots seem to have the same meaning of Giacometti’s pedestals. These bronze figures are like interrogative apparitions. Every time they appear in the void, they reframe the fundamental classical questions of life: «Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We going?».In a insecure equilibrium, the bronze girl of Kristalova and for instance L’homme qui chavire of Giacometti capture the fragility and the solitude of the human souls. The dizziness of these shapes gives the idea of the movement, but also the impossibility to reach theabsolute, which is infinite. Like Jean-Paul Sartre said in “La Recherche de l'absolu”: «Giacometti has a horror of the infinite. Not of the Pascalian infinite, of the infinitely great: there is another infinite, more devious, more secret, which slips away from divisibility».

Even though they come from different eras, they share affinities in their choice of artistic material and their sculptures take the imaginary for the real and the real for the imaginary. In this art world, made by imagination and reality, the love is in the roots’ grove that takes the shape of a bronze human being deep-seated in the soil.

The result is a form of art based on impressions and symbols loads of memories, which refer to existential, phsycological and phenomenological aspects of the modern human, who is always mediating between nothingness and being.

According to his definition of life, Alberto Giacometti chose to sculpt the contrast between reality and perception, and he discovered the magic power of the distance through which we observe the objective world. Art belongs more to life and reality than we think. We walk like Kristalova’s bronze girl but we dream as the Giacometti’s figures.

- Virginia Marano, intern at Artipelag

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You asked and we will deliver! We like happy visitors and giving things for you to remember our exhibitions by. This little brochure with all the works in the #detour exhibition will accompany the map and text in the entrance fee. #artipelag#omvägar #sculpture#contemporarysculpture #samtidskonst#museumlearning #graphicdesign#archipelago

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“Trots att verken innehållsligt drar åt en mängd olika håll har man ändå lyckats skapa en sammanhållen utställning. Mycket för att de utvalda konstnärerna arbetar med tydliga gestalter ofta i enfärgade material, som brons, lera eller bemålad keramik. “ Magnus Bons recenserar Detour / Omvägar på konsten.net

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Wonderful day today opening the Detour sculpture exhibition in the surrounding nature of Artipelag #detour#omvägar #artipelag #sculpture#contemporarysculpture #contemporaryart#skulptur #samtidskonst

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Late night drone filming

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The look and feel

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https://www.nvp.se/Kultur--Noje/skulptur-for-olika-natur/

“Artipelag har alltid varit omgivet av, och velat vara en del av, naturen omkring. Nu fyller man skogen med verk av tolv svenska och internationella konstnärer. En del av verken kan bli en del av ett permanent ”museum utanför museet”.”

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Idun Baltzersen receiving much deserved attention prior to her participation in Detour.

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An early selfie in Eva Schlegel´s “Single Circular Mirror”, 2017