crossing | 2007 | acrylics, oil and lac colour on mdf | 70 x 70 cm |
Fredrik Norén
Opening: Saturday, 18 January, 6 pm
19.01. - 01.03.2008
Tuesday - Saturday 12 - 6 pm |
Following the gallery's successful presentation of Fredrik Norén last summer in the group exhibition "Beauty Spot", we are pleased to be able to welcome the young Swedish artist back to Berlin for his first solo exhibition.
The fascination of Fredrik Norén's work lies in his precise use of technique in both his sculptural/installational objects and his paintings. Due to the perfect rendering of materials, Norén consistently manages to throw viewers off guard and to force them to look more closely. He achieves this through the perfect imitation of surfaces combined with a form that can be associated with the material but not possible as such. By means of painting, familiar materials are reinvented so that the surface is familiar to the observer, but also irritating due to the unusual or even impossible structure or form. The strip of wood that spirals like a wood shaving looks deceptively real - both the material's appearance and the form initially seem believable - but the size of the strip makes the bend unlikely.
Norén reverses norms. Heavy becomes light, hard looks soft, nothing appears as it is, or as it is dictated by common sense. Like the master chef Ferran Adrià who challenges his guests' sense of taste with his experimental cuisine, Norén attempts to make viewers visually sensitive to what they see or believe to see. Norén plays with the viewers' insecurity: at first they are misled by something visually familiar and do not initially perceive their error; finally they recognise that what is seen doesn't correspond to their own experience of the material. The works' humorous undertone avoids being didactic, and sensitises the viewer's relation to the forms, which in part distinguish the "artificial" from the "natural" with only minimal details.
Fredrik Norén, born 1979, lives and works in Malmö
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