Egill Sæbjörnsson

Egill Sæbjörnsson

Candidates 2019

The Icelandic artist Egill Sæbjörnsson is possibly best known for his imaginary friends. They are Ugh and Boogar – 36-metre, coffee-loving, human-eating trolls, who gained global notoriety at the Venice Biennale in the summer of 2017.

Introduction

Egill Sæbjörnsson

The Icelandic artist Egill Sæbjörnsson is possibly best known for his imaginary friends. They are Ugh and Boogar – 36-metre, coffee-loving, human-eating trolls, who gained global notoriety at the Venice Biennale in the summer of 2017.

The idea for Ugh and Boogar came up in 2007, when Sæbjörnsson saw some long-snouted troll figures in a souvenir shop. They began to grow in his mind. “It started as just me flirting with the phenomenon of trolls and then they became these imaginary characters […] without really even intending to make art with them. But as they got bigger and bigger, they eventually took over my life,” he says. “They are a little bit like megalomaniacs with a really big temper.”1)

When the trolls heard that their friend had been invited to the Biennale, they grew envious and hijacked the Icelandic pavilion for themselves. A unique exhibition emerged, which was widely reported in the international press.

You have to strike while the iron is hot. In that same year, the resourceful trolls launched the range of luxury goods that they had designed and commandeered Helsinki’s Galerie Anhava as their shop. On the elegant sales tables were jewellery and bottles of perfume, their sizes enormous and their surfaces glistening gold. We might perhaps say that the trolls’ taste still lacks polish.
Along with art and music, Egill Sæbjörnsson (b. 1973) has studied Tibetan Mentalphysics, clowning, 3D animation and interactive programing, in both Reykjavik and Paris. He is a multidisciplinary artist, whose art is based both on the use of technology as a continuation of painting and sculpture, and on combining real objects and projected illusions with sound, music and performance.

The giant trolls fit this picture well when we think of Icelandic folklore, which teems with fairies, goblins and other beings. The Icelandic artist is aware of the clichés associated with his home country and is able to have fun at their expense.

At the same time, Sæbjörnsson’s art is clever, sincere and profound. It surprises, amuses and confuses. It poses serious questions about existence, but does so in a way that both the artist himself and his viewers can enjoy. Even though Sæbjörnsson’s works are experimental and innovative, it is important to him that we do not require any separate instructions, study or background information to understand them.

Timo Valjakka

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Aurora Reinhard

Aurora Reinhard

Candidates 2019

Aurora Reinhard (b. 1975) has been called a “life explorer”. In her art she has long been examining the power and emotional relationships between women and men. Conversely, she has dealt – often very directly – with various issues involved in the pictorial representation of sexuality and gender identity.

Introduction

Aurora Reinhard

Among Aurora Reinhard’s latest works is Martyr (2018) – a white plaster sculpture nearly half a metre high, of a naked woman whose body is pierced by three golden arrows. The work is a kind of self-portrait: it is based on a 3D scan of the artist’s own body, and the arrows refer to romantic encounters that have touched her deeply.

Reinhard seeks the subjects for her works in media and advertising imagery, and in the history of western art. She, nevertheless, interprets the images she finds through her own personal experiences, frequently switching a gender or the direction of a gaze. The background to the Martyr sculpture is the Saint Sebastian familiar from Renaissance art – an officer in the Roman army and a Christian, who lived in the 3rd century AD, miraculously survived execution and, judging by some of the paintings, does not even appear to have suffered very much.

In replacing the male saint with her own body, Reinhard brings the almost two-millennia-old story into the present day. She gives it not only a personal, but also a universally comprehensible significance, associated not with divine relations but with those between human beings.

Aurora Reinhard (b. 1975) has been called a “life explorer”. In her art she has long been examining the power and emotional relationships between women and men. Conversely, she has dealt – often very directly – with various issues involved in the pictorial representation of sexuality and gender identity. In so doing she has also put herself on the line, seeking answers both in front of the camera and behind it. Either disguised or, as in her recent works, without a mask, she herself is the model for her own works.
Recurrent themes include an almost systematic and frequently provocative critique of one-dimensional, idealized images of women. The female figures in her photographic works wear excessive amounts of make-up and dress in a manner that evokes the imagery of pornography. This exaggeration is, nevertheless, so obvious and the means of constructing the illusions so transparent that the works’ real message cannot go unrecognized.

One thing that it is impossible to ignore when faced with Reinhard’s photographs and sculptures is how perfect they are. It is as though they are self-generated or have fallen from heaven, even when they are cracked, like the plaster sculpture Broken (2017). They are reminiscent of (and occasionally also imitate) industrially manufactured luxury products.

And yet the immaculateness of Reinhard’s works is not an end in itself. It is overdone and serves the same goal as the excessive make-up and costumes in her photographs. It brings out the mind’s covert hopes and desires, while at the same time revealing the mirage-like character of the things that fuel them.

Timo Valjakka

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Ragnar Kjartansson

Ragnar Kjartansson

ARS FENNICA 2019

Ragnar Kjartansson (born 1976 in Reykjavik moves freely between art forms, makes music sculptural, painting performative, and turns film into tableaux vivants. His elaborate practice includes video installations based on repetitive structures, extended live performances and vast series of plein-­‐air paintings. At the core of all this lies a scrutiny of the emotional layers, social dimensions, and contradictory elements that make up our everyday lives.   

Introduction

Ragnar Kjartansson

The work of Ragnar Kjartansson (born 1976 in Reykjavik, Iceland) is originally grounded in theatre, performance and painting. But, as he moves freely between art forms, he makes music sculptural, painting performative, and turns film into tableaux vivants. His elaborate practice includes video installations based on repetitive structures, extended live performances and vast series of plein-­‐air paintings. At the core of all this lies a scrutiny of the emotional layers, social dimensions, and contradictory elements that make up our everyday lives.   

Kjartansson‘s practice reflects art in all its multiplicity of forms. His work is an ode to art as such, but also an exposé. While we are creating and enjoying music, theatre, film, literature and visual art, we are both raising our spirits and examining our human condition.

Kjartansson transports and transposes this precarious science from one artform to another, variously citing their histories, as well as his own biography. He provides clues to the mechanisms of art by displaying both its façade and its hidden side. He challenges the possibilities and limits of artistic creation, the result being a pairing of the wonderful and the ridiculous. And the two clash relentlessly; reality versus art, doubt versus hope. They obstruct one another, mirror each other, or ultimately merge into one.

Ragnar Kjartansson’s work reveals the degree to which we continually construct our own reality – while his playful approach reminds us of the pleasure that we can allow ourselves in that process.

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Miriam Bäckström

Miriam Bäckström

Candidates 2019

Miriam Bäckström’s work is driven by her intense study of the symbiotic relationship between image and reality in the human psyche.She uses various artistic media, including photography, film, performance, theatre, installation, and text.

Introduction

Miriam Bäckström

Miriam Bäckström’s work is driven by her intense study of the symbiotic relationship between image and reality in the human psyche.

She uses various artistic media, including photography, film, performance, theatre, installation, and text. Her early work as a conceptual photographer involved technically precise depictions of interior spaces – such as apartments, museum galleries and department store vitrines – where the human figure was eerily absent yet implied in various ways. It was as if these environments were stage-sets in search of their characters.

Bäckström consistently aims for technical precision and innovation, regardless of whether she works with still or moving images. At the same time, she has opened her practice to collaborations that allow for the improvisational and the theatrical. These might be films, live performances or published texts, in which boundaries between the documentary and the fictional, as well as between the original and the appropriated, are speculative transgressed.

Bäckström’s hybrid, experimental practice exploits and subverts the conventions of visualising and story-telling, stagecraft and exhibition-making. Throughout her oeuvre, she has tested conflicting approaches to authorship and subjectivity, performance and spectatorship, the public and the private, fact and fiction. She is always looking for a new image, a new experience, a new emotion – so new that no one will quite know how to perceive and respond to them.

In her recent and ongoing work, Bäckström is applying this quest to the medium of machine- woven tapestry, produced on computer-programmed jacquard looms. Photographic perception is pushed to a point where distinctions between medium, image, material and surface become uncertain and unsatisfactory and a collapse of seeing and understanding is suggested. In the series New Enter Image, the new image gives rise to a new perspective: an immersive crafted reality where the viewer is always-already inside the image.

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Petri Ala-Maunus

Petri Ala-Maunus

Candidates 2019

When Petri Ala-Maunus (b.1970) was younger and thought about what he would do as an artist, he decided to proceed via negation. Because landscape painting interested him the least, he decided to start painting landscapes, but in his own way.

Introduction

Petri Ala-Maunus

When Petri Ala-Maunus (b.1970) was younger and thought about what he would do as an artist, he decided to proceed via negation. Because landscape painting interested him the least, he decided to start painting landscapes, but in his own way. During the 1990s, he became known for his skilful, often saccharine sunsets, which were created not only on canvases of different sizes, but also on almost any type of material, ranging from pizza boxes to maple leaves.

The sunsets are not just a matter of ironic play, of transposing the clichés of Sunday-market art to the framework of contemporary art. These serial works that resemble each other raise questions about the nature of the romantic landscape and about the human contribution to the meanings it contains.

Five years ago, Ala-Maunus went over to paintings without a trace of human presence. They are majestic views into a pre or post-human world, and astonishingly precisely executed. When we are faced with them it feels as though all the elements of Antiquity had been set loose at once.

The paintings are greatly indebted to the romantic landscape art that emerged at the Düsseldorf Academy in the 19th century. The Romantics favoured untouched, untamed nature, which they depicted in fine detail, dramatizing it as larger than human life, as simultaneously arousing both fear and awe. Similar aspirations can be detected in Ala- Maunus’ works.
Real-life mountains and waterfalls were not enough for the Romantics. Their works are composites, painted collages constructed in the studio. Ala-Maunus, too, assembles his paintings out of dozens of parts and details. They are simulations of the landscape in Jean Baudrillard’s sense – copies without an original. They are nameless places dating thousands of years from the present moment, but in which direction? Creation story and end of the world go hand in hand.

One of the challenges for the Düsseldorfers was to get their composite images to be coherent. One device for this was limiting the palette to a few kindred hues, somewhat in the same manner as in black-and-white photographs. Ala-Maunus, too, frequently bases his paintings on just three or four colours. But, unlike his predecessors, he reveals the fictive nature of the paintings by leaving passages in them that shatter the illusion. They remind us that this is a painting, a two-dimensional surface covered in paint.

The vast mountain ranges, the wildly foaming cascades and the dark-limbed fir trees are rendered almost as supernatural in Ala-Maunus’ paintings. Being from the countryside, he has both a living relationship with nature and a respect for skilled handicraft inherited from his home. He paints subjects that he likes and does so just as he wants, aiming for perfection. “If only I could do that even better,” he often thinks when facing a painting that he has just completed.arsfennica.fi

Timo Valjakka | Translation: Mike Garner

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