Close-Ups: About the artists

About the artists


The Dutch born, Los Angeles based artist Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975) built many of his works up around a simple action, most often involving himself. Ader died in 1975, in an attempt to cross the Atlantic in a small sailing vessel as part of the work, In Search of the Miraculous. Here in the 1990s he has been rediscovered for his original performance influenced works, many of them documented on film or photo.


Likewise, the Swedish artist Tommy Olsson includes performance in his works. He often uses images from rock and pop culture, in order to investigate their influence on our experience of our own identity. The problem of identity runs through his production, as does a general interest in media images, and the way in which they are connected to the body, sex, illness and violence.


In England, Richard Billingham's photographs of his family and their troubled life have created a lot of public attention. Billingham is part of the so-called Brit Art generation, which had a break-through with the controversial exhibition of the Saatchi collection, Sensation. In general, Billingham's style of photography can be said to be characterised by being slightly haphazard, there are atypical frames, and angles that in an instant capture unexpected incidents in the family flat. The pictures dwell on details which can be seen as reflections of the emotional territories of the family.


Annika Ström (Sweden) is well known in Denmark for her video based works, where she reflects on the role of the artist, or investigates our relationship to private life, often using herself or her family. Her works of art contain certain elements from the documentary in their depictions of the apparently trite everyday actions of everyday life - actions that nevertheless reveal clues to identity or social context.


Matthew Buckingham and Joachim Koester exhibit their joint project titled Sandra of the Tuliphouse. The work consists of a series of stills, which use reality as a backdrop for a fictional account of a woman and the choices she makes in life. Buckingham usually works as a film director, and often uses astyle where image, sound and inserts drive the plot onward without any dialogue. Joachim Koester among other things works with video and photography. A real action, an incident or a motif is set up in relationship to the way it is exposed through media.


The installation, Consolation Service, by Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Finland) is shown, which she received an Honorable Mention for, at the Biennale in Venice. Ahtila often uses sophisticated narrative constructions, where elements from advertising films, music videos and traditional film structures are mixed with the spatial dimensions of installation art. In her works, fragile identity is an important concern, and the many ways in which the large quantity of available media influence our perception of ourselves and our social orientation.


Pierre Huyghe (France) is especially known for his installations which incorporate existing material from films or whi¬ch are based on visual material from popular culture. The installation Sleeptalking uses a sequence from Andy Warhol's first film, Sleep (1963) juxtaposed with new recordings of John Giorno, the author who allowed his face and body to be used in Warhol's film. A central concern in Huyghe's works is the way in which the invasion of media ima¬ges in the real world creates an unavoidable fictional space for us all.


Christoph Girardet (Germany) also uses existing films as a base. From here he puts the forms of meaning and experience linked to conventional film into perspective. In No Forever (Golden), Girardet has used a short sequence from the German UFA film, Die goldene Stadt (Veit Harlan, 1942). The work of art consists of a loop, where the same short sequence - a close-up of the actress Kristina Söderbaum - is repeated in slow-motion, producing a hypnotic effect.


The Danish artist Eva Koch started off in sculpture, but here in the nineties she has moved into using more sound and moving images. In later years one category of Koch's video installations have circled around human beings, individuals in social settings. The video installation, In the Interrim, shows close-ups of faces and glances captured in St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. Here we meet distracted inquisitiveness, indifferent faces, and a system of wandering, shifting glances.


Lawrence Weiner's work is grounded in sculpture as well, though he first and foremost uses language itself for his material, both words and the language of film. Since the sixties, Weiner has been known for his text-based works, which often articulate themselves as writing on the wall. Weiner has been involved in a number of other projects at the same time, including directing film. For a number of years, Lawrence Weiner has been interested in Dreyer's films, and in 1994 he published the essay, Carl Th. Dreyer. A Fable of Women and Water, which is reprinted in the catalogue for the exhibition.