Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg Exhibition
Zach Feuer Gallery
This event has ended.
Zach Feuer Gallery presents an exhibition of Nathalie Djurberg's and Hans Berg's most recent work, which continues to bridge the boundaries between the cinematic, the sculptural, and the performative by creating immersive environments that pair moving images and musical compositions with related sculpture.
Bang Your Little Drums, Djurberg's and Berg's most recent clay animation, begins with words, written in Day-Glo colors, scrawled against a black background. The accompanying music appears to take its directive from the text - stomp your little feet, snap your little finger - ritualizing and elevating these simple, banal actions to orchestral heights. As in their previous work, there is no singular narrative. The text is followed by a chained brown bear mindlessly piling scoop after scoop of ice cream atop a sugar cone until he can no longer exercise self-control. In a subsequent scene, a man in a green suit unpeels a giant banana that serves as a cocoon for a young boy. After the man in the green suit releases the boy from the cocoon, he enfolds himself in it, highlighting the artists' continued interest in all forms of transformation and masquerade and at the same time illustrating our penchant for enhancing the mundane (such as 'snap your little finger') to instill such an action or an object with newfound significance.
Three large sculptures, that are suspended from the ceiling and occupy a separate gallery, resemble the costumes worn by the characters in Bang Your Little Drums. These works are composed of canvas on which Djurberg has painted different motifs including radiating, goopy concentric circles of color that can be read as separate yet intertwined cosmos. The artists are not only interested in character transformation but also the transformative power of raw materials from a collection of objects to abstract paintings in space. Costumes often force the character that wears the costume to take on a role defined by other's perceptions. Once a person removes the attire, the costume looses its potency and becomes a shell, a discarded cocoon, subject to fragility since it is no longer imbued with such power.
In the third gallery, sits a meticulously crafted white ice cream box on a white table, fabricated from the same material, but with legs of brilliant melting colors. If one places one's head inside the box, one is transported to a universe where melting popsicles and cascading sprinkles stand in for the different components of Djurberg's and Berg's universe. As in so much of their work, the artists continue to strive to grasp the supermundane through seemingly simple actions across several mediums.
Nathalie Djurberg (b. 1978, Lysekil, Sweden) received her MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 2002. Hans Berg (b. 1978, Rättvik, Sweden) is a music producer who makes techno and house music in addition to the music for the clay animations. Their work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions around the world. Most notably, they presented the installation The Experiment in the exhibition Making Worlds at the 53rd Venice Biennale, for which they were awarded the prestigious Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist in 2009. Their most recent US exhibition The Parade opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and traveled to the New Museum in New York and the Yerba Buena Center for the Art in San Francisco. Their work is represented in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Moderna Museet, Stockholm as well as the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This is their third exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery.
[Image: Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg "Still from Bang Your Little Drums" (2013) Clay animation, digital video, 10:41]
Media
Schedule
from February 26, 2013 to March 30, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-03-07 from 18:00 to 20:00