7.10.2022–5.2.2023

HOLMGÅRDs gALLERIA and The Association of Finnish Sculptors (SKL) are organizing the exhibition Nordisk Skulptur i Danmark, featuring works by the Finnish artists Petri Eskelinen, Anni Laakso and Pia Sirén and the Danish artists Eric Andersen, Mogens Jacobsen and Sofie Thorsen. Furthermore, the exhibition will present a collaborative work by Ida Brockmann (DK) and Anna-Lea Kopperi (FIN), which was initiated at Galleria Sculptor, for the exhibition nordiSKulptur 3, in Helsinki, in October 2021.

The exhibition Nordisk Skulptur i Danmark, is a continuation of the ongoing, four-year long, collaboration, nordiSKulptur, between The Association of Finnish Sculptors and the Nordic Culture Point, that aims to advance professional exchange between Nordic artists, who are working within the field of contemporary sculpture. The Finnish artists were selected through an open call, and the Danish artists were selected individually, by the curator PeterHolmgård.

The planning of the project, and the preliminary production, was of course very much affected by the pandemic. To meet these challenges, it was early in the process decided, that the curatorial concept should be to embrace changeability and uncertainty, both thematically and in terms of production, by applying a flexible and organic approach, that allows us to continuously adapt to changing circumstances. That proved to be a very good decision.

The exhibition is supported by Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Finlands Kulturinstitut i Danmark, and Kulturfonden for Finland og Danmark.

Nordisk Skulptur i Danmark is curated by Peter Holmgård, and it opens in Copenhagen on October 7, 2022. The exhibition runs until October 30.

Sculptor Petri Eskelinen (b.1975) has held numerous exhibitions and created public works – for instance to the new children’s hospital in Helsinki. Eskelinen graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. His works are often based on invention, problem-solving, and transforming impossible ideas into three-dimensional artworks. Many of Eskelinen’s mechanical works allow participation; they are, in a way, social experiences that only appear in their entirety to the ones watching. Lately, Eskelinen has been working with time-lapse videos and plants. Seeking out plants’ problem-solving ability.

In the exhibition in October Petri Eskelinen will present:

The Mechanical movement (2 experiments), 2020, Wooden instrument, 4K time-lapse video, 8:13 min

The aim of the experiment was to get the plants to make ‘a mechanical movement’ in a way that they would somehow be operating the instrument I build. I feel that even if the plants are growing here like they would in a natural environment, it still feels a bit un-natural for the plants to be operating the instrument.

Anna-Lea Kopperi is internationally known for her environmental installations, public sculptures, and participatory works. At the 56th Venice Biennale, she implemented a participatory environmental installation Isle of Dreams. Her recent exhibitions are participatory projects Lake of Dreams in Yerevan, Net of Dreams at Didrichsen Art Museum in Helsinki, and mirror installations Room of Angels and Mirrors of Times at Within Light/Inside Glass exhibitions in Venice and Lisbon. Works of Kopperi have been exhibited e.g. in Overbeck-Gesellschaft in Lübeck and environmental sculpture Embrazing the Chestnut Tree at Documenta X in Kassel.

Kopperi sheds light on the relations between the environmental space and the human space. She locates her conceptual artworks within the spiritual and historical context of the site. In her spatial and collective projects she investigates the concept of a site and situation varying materials and interaction. Her ephemeral oeuvre arises from the ecological and esthetical aspects of the site as homage for light and architecture. Through a silent and focused thinking process she combines her perceptions of spaces with existentially essential questions like life and death, time and continuity.

Works of Kopperi are in public collections of several countries and her permanent sculptures have been erected around Europe e.g. Pointillistic Bridge in Imatra, Blue-red-bridge in Helsinki and granite sculpture Together in Vejby. Her environmental participatory public work Endless Berry Path was planted and published in Lahti, Finland, 2022. The visual artist was born 1960 in Finland, studied in Finland, France and Germany, and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf 1996.

Ida Brockmann was born in 1991 and she lives and works in Copenhagen. She graduated as a Bachelor of Arts from the Valand Academy in Gothenburg. Her art consists of various techniques and materials, including most recently ceramics, stones, and videos. Brockmann is interested in material culture and in those objects that surround us and that we leave behind. Her way of working brings to light the cultural and social layers that are linked to everyday objects and she strives to alter the existing conception of these objects. “What we consider trivial often contains many layers of information about history, social interactions, power, and values.”

In the exhibition at HOLMGÅRDs gALLERIA in October Anna-Lea Kopperi and Ida Brockmann will present a collaborative work: Excavations of our Minds.

Anna-Lea Kopperi (FI) and Ida Brockmann (DK) present their second collaborative artwork Excavations of Our Minds. It arises from the correspondence of letters between the artists sharing a variety of carefully selected objects and fragile materials. The sent materials carried emotional meanings for the artists. After the process of giving away the personal material – do the objects still contain these emotions? The emotions are transformed into an installation resembling a landscape or archaeological excavation. Each organic piece of sand is marked with a label indicating the emotional relation to the object. The installation reveals the discoveries of their mind like imprints of vanished artefacts. In doing so, the artists emphasize the importance of their non-visible thoughts, dreams, emotions and ideas behind the materialized outcome.

Born in 1971 in Denmark, Sofie Thorsen lives and works in Vienna. She has shown her work internationally in numerous group and solo exhibitions over the last 2 decades. She is currently an associate professor at Funen Art Academy in Odense, Denmark. Her drawings, sculptures and installation-based work is dedicated to questions of perception and space as well as themes such as display, architecture and archeology.

In the exhibition in October Sofie Thorsen will present:

De smukkeste erhvervelser / The most beautiful acquisitions

Large frottages and flint axes made of plaster spread over a series of constructions consisting of thin brass rods. The constructions are nothing more than the outline of a room or a rudimentary showcase that can neither protect nor show the things it contains. The objects do not fulfill any of the things that one expects from a museum object. They are not original, they are present as impressions and outlines, and they do not respect the boundaries of the boxes in which they appear.

In the 1990s, Odense Museum embarked on an enormous task: the digitization of the countless objects listed in the museum’s acquisition protocols from 1860 to 1972. These thousands of photographs are now freely available to everyone on the Internet. It is some of these photographs, the outlines of clay vessels, stone axes, arrowheads and jewellery, that form the basis for the forms in the frottages. Most of the original objects are in the museum’s depository, but their outlines are present in the work, in a temporary and not particularly durable form as flat documents that at most become 3-dimensional because the paper rolls up.

The installation contains elements from a specific collection from a specific time in the history of Odense City Museums. But the work focuses above all on the act of exhibiting and showing objects in the space of the sculpture hall, and in the spaces formed by the brass constructions. And about plaster copies and impressions, about giving a digital photo a kind of temporary body.

It is also about the interaction between visible and accessible images and the inaccessible and intangible objects in a collection. That things can miraculously be preserved for thousands of years in a bog or a field, only to be found, registered, and disappear again in a storage, only to be picked up by someone very rarely again.

Mogens Jacobsen was born in Italy and is living in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has been working with digital art, objects, and installations for more than 3o years, and he was one of the pioneers of Danish internet art. In 1992 he cofounded the Danish net-art collective ”The Artnode Foundation”. His works focus on the temporal and material aesthetics of systems, processes, instructions, and code. His artworks often take the form of machines or devices that critically and humorously examine technology and our everyday lives coping with technology.

Mogens’ work has been exhibited at numerous national and international venues, among others the Media Art Festival in Japan, FILE in Brazil, ZKM in Germany, the Transmediale in Germany, and the Ars Electronica in Austria. In 2018, he completed a large-scale interactive sculpture in the city of Vallensbæk outside Copenhagen. The Danish Arts Foundation commissioned this pioneering piece as the first permanent interactive electronic sculpture in outdoor public space in Denmark.

Mogens Jacobsen teaches experimental and critical design at the IT University of Copenhagen. He often works in interdisciplinary collaborative groups on research projects.

Wataru Komachi is a Japanese multi-artist from Tokyo. He is working with painting, collage-posters, fashion and installatory interventions in commercial spaces. He has collaborated with musician Beck and brands like Christophe Lemaire, Hysteric Glamour, Lacoste and Uniqlo.

In the exhibition in October Mogens Jacobsen will present:

Phones 1-9, 2020. Phones are a series of nine rubber casts of old Nokia 3310 phones.

The cast has a small screen inside. These screens show rough animations in black and white.

The Phones series is a collaboration between Danish artist Mogens Jacobsen and Japanese artist Wataru Komachi, who made the visuals for the animations.

Anni Laakso is interested in space: the production and perception of it. In her artistic work, she has occupied spaces, by a transitory space, constructed of different and largely re-used materials. Through her installations Laakso intends to create new spaces and forms within an existing environment. Most of Laakso´s work are temporary walk-in installations, which the visitor can enter. The works can be seen both as sculptures and a creation of usable social spaces.

In the exhibition in October Anni Laakso will present:

Flash of levity, 2022, is a sculpture made from used sports equipment that has been modified and repurposed. The sculpture is a visual object but intended to be experienced also bodily by placing oneself in it.

Pia Sirén (b. 1982) creates large-scale temporary landscapes using common construction materials, as well as sculptures, performative projects, and collaborations. Her works, realized both indoors and outdoors, are often spatially and materially engaging installations that you can enter and become part of. Sirén has completed her MFA at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (FI) in 2012. She has had several solo and group shows in Finland and abroad.

In the exhibition in October Pia Sirén will present:

CHOIR

In her work FOREST CHOIR Pia Sirén continues to explore structures that relate to the concepts of nature and landscape. Our world is increasingly man-made and nature is often seen as a resource and backdrop for human life and activity. The work FOREST CHOIR literally puts the forest on stage, raising questions about our identity in relation to the surrounding natural world. The aim is not to build an illusion of nature but rather to emphasize our aspirations and desires to reconstruct and imitate nature.

”The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those who sang best.” (Henry Van Dyke)

Eric Andersen (born 1943) is a Danish artist and composer. He was one of the central figures in the international Fluxus network and has been active in an international art field since the early 1960s. His art is characterized by the fact that it mixes existing media in new ways and thus breaks down the boundaries between art forms – as well as between art and everyday life. It is not only things we normally associate with art that are mixed, but also all kinds of other elements, from bureaucratic structures to urban space or to social situations, all of which are included as elements in Eric Andersen’s practice. The very basic thing is that something happens that we often don’t have words for yet because we haven’t experienced it before.

In the exhibition in October Eric Andersen will present:

MARIANNE

The work will be presented on video. This is what Eric Andersen is saying about the work:

Livet er for kort til alt for få stjerner på himmelhvælvet.

Lad os nu øge mængden.

MA                                     RUM

RI                                       VIDENSKAB

AN                                      INSTALLERE

NE                                      MENNESKEHED