Louise Bourgeois, Angela de la Cruz, Meta Isæus-Berlin, Riitta Päiväläinen, Ulf Rollof, “Fabric Works 2017 Stockholm”
Stockholm, 5.18–6.17 2017
Galleri Andersson/Sandström rounds off the season with five artists who have used fabric elements in their practice in a highly personal and individual way, reflecting on themes as history, protection, human presence and representation.
For Louise Bourgeois (born 1911 in Paris, France- died 2010 in New York, USA), fabrics played an important role. From a young age she helped out in her parents’ tapestry restoration workshop and after a lifelong gathering of household items such as clothes, napkins and bed linen, she began in the mid 1990s to cut them up and and re-stitched these; the lived materials became art. Through sewing she tried to reach psychological repair. Bourgeois has said: ‘I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole’.
Angela de la Cruz (born 1965 in La Coruna, Spain): ”Deflated are a number of paintings without frame that make them hang like coats. They are always the same height as my own, 153 cm, (they represent how short I am) and the width can be variable, depending on the frame they originally was painted on. They are painted horizontally in one stroke. The works come from being deflated myself, according to a friend of mine when he first saw me after I was having a stroke. If you take the frame off any painting, the only way to hang them is in the middle, like a cloth. They are like commodity paintings, I can do many if I take the frame off. They have to be very beautiful and fresh”.
Meta Isæus-Berlin (born 1963 in Stockholm, Sweden): “Oblivion is about time. Our bodies carrying it, layer on layer. The installation shows an evasive vision that may happen, has happened or like she (Persefone) hopes, will happen”. In Isæus-Berlin’s three-dimensional installations, matter is charged with an emotional and poetic energy located between wakefulness and dreaming.
Riitta Päiväläinen (born 1969 in Maaninka, Finland) is fascinated by the history that cannot be found in library books, official files or archives. This “unwritten history” that surrounds us all the time – the presence that can be felt in the rip of a coat, in the place worn thin on an armchair. Dialogues between nature and objects are a part of Päiväläinens ongoing thematics and in her latter series ”River Notes” the artist looks deeper into our subconscious and explores the combination of ribbons and water reflections. Ribbons are cut, sewn together arranged on bushes and watercourses, creating a mystical scenography in desert places.
The piece Skyddsdräkt för ko (Protective suit for cow) came from a dream that Ulf Rollof (born 1961 in Karlskrona, Sweden) had when he lived in Mexico. In the dream he saw bullocks in the dark who plowed the fields in the light of big fires. He thought that the animals would burn their bodies on the fire and he decided to create a protective suit for them. After some time he became aware of a real-size wooden cow carved by a dairy farmer and a tailor took the measurements on the wooden cow. Skyddsdräkt för ko could then be tailored and the dream got physical shape.