Ry David Bradley and Hanna Hansdotter “Once Twice”
The Hole
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The Hole presents Once Twice, the first collaborative exhibition by Ry David Bradley and Hanna Hansdotter. Featuring Hansdotter’s blown glass sculptures and Bradley’s digital-born tapestries, Once Twice melds disparate media by the two artists, united by a shared investment in process and craft.
Bucking art market norms, Bradley’s tapestries in Once Twice will be for sale both as physical objects and simultaneously as unique files via SuperRare. Editioned as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), their ownership will be recorded through a blockchain ledger to provide proof of purchase and provenance. Bradley’s work will also be exhibited virtually in Decentraland, and both artists’ works will be available for purchase through the gallery in both USD and Ethereum.
The biomorphic figures in Bradley’s tapestries aren’t what they appear. Digitally conceived as grayscale works, they are physically woven with RGB colored thread, their vibrancy only visible in close-up. They bear the faces of real people, digitally distorted – registering the seamless, platform-bound fluctuation and masking of identity native to a world of FaceTune and biometric surveillance. Challenging the contemporary visibility fetish, Bradley’s tapestries withhold as much as they disclose, the relative qualities of their physical and digital existences rejecting the question of an “original” work altogether.
Based in the Kingdom of Crystal in Sweden, a region renowned for its hand-blown glass since 1742, Hansdotter forges fleshy, baroque sculptures, frozen in alien morphologies. Drawing on traditional processes she learned in formal training as a glassblower, Hansdotter’s work foregrounds craft and luxurious attention to detail – all in service of bombastic results, culminating in her strange and sensual objects. Five of her sculptures complement Bradley’s tapestries in Once Twice, opening a space for unexpected interplay between newfound collaborators.
Ry David Bradley (b. 1979 Melbourne, Australia) received his MFA from Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Since then, he has exhibited widely both at galleries and museums in his native Australia, as well as in exhibitions and fairs in New York, London, Milan, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and Palm Beach. Bradley is represented by Sullivan & Strumpf in Sydney & The Hole in New York. Bradley’s work is collected by the National Gallery of Victoria, Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon Housemusem, Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, and numerous private collections around the world.
Hanna Hansdotter (b. 1984) is based in Kosta and Boda, in Sweden’s “Kingdom of Crystal.” Drawing on the region’s traditional techniques, her blown glass objects are made to swell between individually shaped iron mills, classical craft processes leading to unexpected results. Her work has been exhibited at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles, CFHILL and Steinsland Berliner Gallery in Stockholm, and is represented in the National Museum Collection in Stockholm. She was also the recipient of the prestigious Åke Andrén grant in Sweden in 2020. This is her first New York exhibition.
Media
Schedule
from February 18, 2021 to March 28, 2021
Opening Reception on 2021-02-18 from 16:00 to 20:00