Alexander Skats, “Diaphanous Dioramas”
Stockholm, 11.10–17.11 2018
Galleri Andersson/Sandström is proud to present Alexander Skats’ first exhibition in the gallery. Skats graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts at Umeå University in spring 2018.
Alexander Skats is a painter and in this exhibition he shows works from two series.
Both with a starting point in his interest in the technological development of digital displays and how it affects our relationship with images. Skats emphasize that the amount of images and access of reaching them makes them consumed in a distracted way, more like a surface. What is behind the image, psychological or philosophical meanings, goes lost when images are considered an abstract visual story or as fragmented material.
One of the series, Diaphanous Dioramas, Sycophants in a Reverie on the Western Shores are paintings related to ideas on images; their production and reproduction, dissemination and communication, symbolism and metaphorical characteristics. He uses photographic originals and the paintings are detailed, chiffered in several layers where elements of the image overlap and melt into each other. Skats look at the paintings as still lifes or a form of landscape paintings, where the digital screen is the virtual landscape we turn to for answers on questions of life, rather than searching for them within the nature. The landscape you meet is tailor-made based on your own preferences and contributes to self-confirmation.
The second series, Idols of the Cave also takes its starting point in Skats’ ideas about the contemporary relationship with images, but also refers to Plato’s allegory of the cave and how our experience of reality is illusory. Skats think of the screen as the cave of our time and how the truths that we we encounter there appears as projected shadows of reality.
Alexander Skats was born in Gothenburg in 1986 and lives and works in Malmö. He graduated from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in the spring of 2018. Skats’ paintings has been presented in a variety of solo and group exhibitions. He has received scholarships from, among others, the foundation of Stiftelsen George Suttners stipendiefond, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, E & H Bergmans, S Linnés fond, Royal Academy of Fine Arts och Stiftelsen Otto and Charlotte Mannheimer fond.