tag:,2011:/1 2011-10-27T08:05:20Z Movable Type 3.35 tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2008://1.5 2011-10-26T10:20:11Z 2011-10-27T08:05:20Z

Born in 1964, Martin Gustavsson lives and works in London Education 1994-96 The Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm 1991-94 Middlesex University, BA Fine Art 1990-91 Middlesex Polytechnic, Art Foundation 1983-84 University of Gothenburg, Political History Selected Solo Exhibitions...

In No Particular Order, Galerie Crone, Berlin 2011 In No Particular Order, Göteborg Konstmuseum 2010 In No Particular Order, Maria Stenfors Gallery, London 2009 Feed Thy Soul, E:vent Gallery, London (with Matteo Rosa) 2008 Wrath of God, Oslo Kunstforening, Norway 2007 Wrath of God, Brändström & Stene, Stockholm Ipomeia, Galleri Mårtenson & Persson, Båstad 2005 Daisy Chain, Karizma Gallery, Kuwait 2004 The Gospel, Brändström & Stene, Stockholm Shedding, Project Space, Museum of Modern Art, London 2003 The Gospel, Malmö Art Museum, Malmö The Gospel, Konsthallen, Bohusläns Museum 2001 By Proxy, Zinc Gallery, Stockholm 2000 Double Happiness, Taro Nasu Gallery, Tokyo 1999 If You Could See Me Now, Titanik, Åbo 1997 Still Lives, Galleri Axel Mörner, Stockholm 1996 Through The Looking Glass, The Project room, The Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm Selected Group Exhibitions 2008 M8’s, Clifford Chance, London Insidan, Murberget, Länsmuseet Västernorrland, Härnösand, Sweden Svenska Självporträtt- från Zorn till samtid, Mjellby Konstmuseum, Halmstad, Sweden 2007 Market art fair, Brändström & Stene, Stockholm Vårsalongen, Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm 2006 Art 37 Basel, Brändström & Stene, Stockholm 2005 Art 36 Basel, Brändström & Stene, Stockholm The Mirror of Desire, Milliken Gallery, Stockholm 2004 Genus & Media, Region Museum Västra Götaland, Sweden 2002 Visitors, Bohusläns Museum, Konsthallen, Uddevalla, Sweden 2001 It's a Wild Party And We are Having a Great Time, Paul Morris Gallery, New York Nu Blommar Det, Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Sweden Swenglish, IASPIS Ateljén, London 1999 Mr Fascination, Thread Waxing Space, New York 1998 Ice Garden, London New Paintings, Abbey Orchard Street, London 1996 Vårutställning, The Royal University Collage of Fine Arts, Stockholm 1995 Hotellet, Hotel Gustav Vasa, Stockholm]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2008://1.4 2011-10-26T10:20:10Z 2011-10-27T08:05:24Z

Therese Marklund, Gud gör comeback (Konstperspektiv, Mars 1, 2008) Linda Fagerström, Konstens knivskarpa gräns mellan sex och naket (Helsingborgs Dagblad, August 18, 2007) Carl-Johan Malmberg, Genombrott för verkligt stort måleri (Svenska Dagbladet, April 2007) Anders Olofsson, Martin Gustavsson (konsten.net, 2007)...

Gud gör comeback (Konstperspektiv, Mars 1, 2008) Linda Fagerström, Konstens knivskarpa gräns mellan sex och naket (Helsingborgs Dagblad, August 18, 2007) Carl-Johan Malmberg, Genombrott för verkligt stort måleri (Svenska Dagbladet, April 2007) Anders Olofsson, Martin Gustavsson (konsten.net, 2007) Milou Allerholm, Ett sensuellt evangelium, (Dagens Nyheter, January 2004) Carl Johan Malmberg, Mäktiga bilder vrider och vänder på manskroppen (Svenska Dagbladet, February 7, 2004) Lilith Waltenberg, Evangelium enligt Gustavsson, (Sydsvenska Dagbladet, February, 2003) Lottie Sällström, Evangeliet sprids i Malmö (QX, February, 2003) Måns Holst-Ekström, Evangelium enligt Martin, Sydsvenskan (Mars 17, 2003) Håkan Nilsson, Dunkelt. Gustavsson ger verkligheten suddiga kanter (Dagens Nyheter, April 7, 2001) Lia Gangitano, Mr Fascination (Trans Magazine, 2001) Peggy Phelan, Repetition and Absence: The Paintings of Martin Gustavsson (2001) Nordic Art Feature (ZOO, Issue 7, 2000) Monty DiPietro, Paintings that invite you to linger longer (The Japan Times, 2000) Jenny Nybom, “Band Mellan Människor” (Åbo underrättelser, Sept. 25 1999) Jari Nikkola, Review (Aamuset, September 22 1999) Bill Arning, Three Swedes (New Art Examiner, 1998) Marika Wachtmeister, “Konsten lever I Stockholm” (Kristianstadsbladet, Sept 1997) Bo Madestrand, ”Vad händer i konsten”? (Expressen, August 25 1997) Mårten Castenfors, ”Med ansiktet i blickpunkten” (Svenska Dagbladet, August 30 1997) Lars O Eriksson, ”Stillsamma höststart” (DN, August 1997)]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2011://1.124 2011-10-26T10:20:09Z 2011-10-26T10:35:24Z

Inevitably making sense This text is derived from a set of questions and answers between the author and the artist, that constituted a live performance at Maria Stenfors Gallery, London on 12th November 2010, during In No Particular Order’s exhibition...

Martin Inevitably making sense This text is derived from a set of questions and answers between the author and the artist, that constituted a live performance at Maria Stenfors Gallery, London on 12th November 2010, during In No Particular Order’s exhibition there. Ten questions and more answers were written separately in advance by the author and the artist respectively, neither knowing what the other’s were. The questions derived from a series of intense studio visits and private conversations between the two during the development of the work. The answers take the form of carefully selected quotations from a diverse range of sources that variously (pre)occupy the artist. During the performance questions and answers were drawn at random, one pair at a time, in the order that they appear below. Their conjunction was pure chance (or something else), emulating or enacting structural and interpretive characteristics of the work exhibited, representing the kind of communication that might occur within a friendship. Dark and wrinkled like a violet carnation, It breathes, humbly lurking in moss Still moist from love following the sweet flight Of white Buttocks to its rim’s heart These canvases are framed only by the room they occupy when exhibited (unconventionally stacked) and this room then becomes them, as in it is also the work. Space becomes material, a terrain plunged into by the viewer, that same strange ravine between at least two ideas of flesh that the viewer occupies in an act of looking. This work becomes by virtue of being there, in a room etc. that it works against, a crack, where a wall meets the floor, or canvases butt the ceiling, there if it is anywhere, of many parts and also indivisible. Thought. Almost a fresco, but split. Is painting the expression of desire, even of an obsessive desire? To own, to make flesh if you like, a kind of transubstantiation of the depicted, image-paint-flesh? Outside what used to be a massive General Motors car plant in Dayton, Ohio, I stand with two women who used to work there. It’s closed now, a victim of recession and globalisation. Road signs and overhead traffic lights swing in the wind. The only sign of life inside the derelict factory, which stretches as far as you can see, is a security guard who eyes us warily through the perimeter fence. Otherwise defunct production continuing in the mind’s eye is here made manifest, enough to be understood as a practice that is also work, the ongoing production or reproduction of images, a production line proposed by the imaginary projection of their number into the kind of endlessness that these paintings and their organisation suggests. Personal relations are written in but more often written out, even dismembered, and this is a coldness to be contended with, seen. Conveyor belt emotion, horror, the modern gay corporation. Happy Days. In this context is it ever possible to make the wrong decision? What could a wrong decision be? I felt very unwell. Woke up with a proverb that seemed very profound at the time: ‘Only when dogs are fierce will the inhabitants be loyal.’ So there it is. Only we are amongst a set of rules that cannot be read outside of an experience that it also determines, like how habit is, when there is every reason and no reason. Obedience to what? Loyalty to whom? Nothing and no-one. No wonder you feel unwell because everything is connecting within one, single, enveloping rupture, but gently like a seasickness of the emotions still to emerge. Some of these images are explicitly religious and some explicitly sexual. The sexual images are erotic because of what they exclude. The religious canvases make me feel uncomfortable because of what they suggest. Why is that? What the painting freezes is the terrible stillness of looking at a body that is neither living nor dead, neither Christ nor the artist’s model, an insatiable looking that is the living eye’s search for the image (the still image) of its own death. Since we are emphatically not redeemed, we call this body paint. We revere it and love it and look at it again and again because, unlike God, painting has and is a body we can touch. Roland Barthes writes Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait, 1975, in these terms – that it is erotic because of what it conceals, not pornographic for what it reveals. And yet in the photograph he refers to we still see Mapplethorpe’s face, his outstretched arm approximately Christ-like. In In No Particular Order there are no faces as such. No image-mirror-paint-flesh in that sense. And we cannot touch even though somebody – you? – might have touched that which is depicted twice, in person and in paint. Is looking touching? Is painting, like desire, that absence? Light moves but I still wonder who they are. And then there is this other body pictured – and I know who it is meaning to be mainly by its wounds. He does not have a face here either. He is not unknown to me as the anyman of a sexual encounter, but rather as religious iconography, which is to say that like these other bodies he is somebody else’s. Are we looking at a map? “The division seems rather unfair,’ I remarked. “You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?” ‘For me,’ said Sherlock Holmes, ‘there still remains the cocaine-bottle.’ And he stretched his long white hand up for it. Land and the self might both be divided – into countries, constituencies, property, a grid of rectangular images, public/private, consciousness/oblivion etc. The map can be read contingent upon how visible or invisible the reasons for its divisions are, and it can give rise to material goods, a body or mysteries. Is this the work or is that the work? Like, will there always be a performative aspect to this project? And how? He looked, he stopped, he pondered before some object, dismissed it ironically, passed on to another. The same thing happened before a stall poorer then the others - if it could be called a stall. In fact, all the wares were spread on the ground, on the bare dust. Behind them, grazed by the feet of the crowd that walked along past the open doors of the shops, were the sellers; three young men between fifteen and thirty, whom the excitement and the night spent in the open (sleeping on the ground, just where they were now) had reduced to silence: an extraordinarily expressive silence, however. The presence of the artist’s body is more often than not used in contemporary culture as a currency facilitator, as if it is evidence, proof or validation of the work made – or at the very least a supporting structure on which the visibility of the work made is dependent, or mediated as entertainment, even as the artist browses. At the same time there is an institutional conspiracy of silence around this functioning, as if this body might be but grazed by the feet of art history as it passes by. For to do otherwise would acknowledge an instability that the institution cannot contain, as in, it cannot be owned. It is in this way – when the body or its idea becomes the work in whichever way - that all performative structures offer the potential of resistance to a dominant culture and its means, bodies maybe sat on dust but also be themselves sand underfoot. How do you make the decision about what to paint when? i.e. is there a connection that you make in your process or progress from one canvas to the next that remains invisible – or is deliberately obscured – by the way in which the work is shaped by this method of display? The key incentive in his measures was that "work should always pay and that you should be better off in work than out of work". Back to the line. Narrative is an inevitability – one thing always happens after another, even if this is just the passing of time rather than events, words on a page, or images in rows. This linearity almost always intimates causality. We look for it and insist upon it compulsively as a condition of the act of reading so familiar as to be subconscious. Here, though, a new line of chance supercedes the chronological order in which the individual canvases were made while at the same time suggesting it as something to be thought about. Narrative does not go away but in the combination of choice and chance, a/the line is broken and remade continuously, an endless game of sorts, just the suggestion of an unaccountable economy. Across the individual canvasses here there is a flatness and a dismemberment and the two seem to have a relationship to each other – pattern, an almost photo-realism (broken by a blob of paint straight from the tube), a leg, a bum, a trunk. What’s the nature of that relationship? The difference between illusions and delusions- so far as comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy are concerned- is that delusions are best gotten rid of, whereas illusions are never abandoned without some risk. The form of these illusions – these formal illusions – reveal delusions which would otherwise have been ours. The hand is definitely but only intermittently visible as a brushstroke. In the flesh – the flesh – images hang between what is sometimes a near-photographic surface (grapes, plums) and the depth of a painterly materiality (drips, blobs, unfinished finished-ness). Both situations might be read in the way we read a truncated body, like stop-points to the imagination, the refusal of a mise-en-scene, disbelief not suspended, against romance. Of the personal but things in themselves. Is it inevitable that we – as in you and I and all viewers of this work – will always make sense of how the canvasses are ordered and presented? A certain inherent narrativising that we can’t avoid? Orange and hazelnut go wonderfully well together. They offer a good balance of freshness and earthiness and the flavours are subtle enough to complement the beans without overpowering them. Narrative does not go away. Passages appeal to taste (or distaste), which itself becomes the thing seen, while always understood within an irrepressible act of individuated reading – one that does not succeed through the conditions of collective agreement by which meaning is usually established, but rather threads separate, sub-rational stories that are most times silent. How do you understand the balance between the personal and the formal in this work? Saturday’s New Moon brings both very personal issues to a head and, equally, shakes up existing arrangements. You’re overwhelmed. Therefore, withdraw and allow what must happen to take place without attempting to influence events. This may be out of character. But you’ll soon realise things are far less fixed than you imagined. Plus you can make any necessary changes over the coming weeks. ]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2011://1.123 2011-09-14T14:36:59Z 2011-09-21T07:14:50Z

We are pleased to present a new installation of “In No Particular Order” of Swedish artist Martin Gustavsson. The ongoing series of image constellations has been exhibited in London (2010) and in Gothenburg (2011) and will be now shown in...

Martin ]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2011://1.116 2011-09-03T09:27:51Z 2011-09-03T09:37:34Z

Martin ]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2011://1.103 2011-02-28T10:33:16Z 2011-02-28T10:36:28Z

Martin ]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2011://1.102 2011-02-28T10:22:53Z 2011-02-28T10:32:39Z

In the exhibition ”In No Particular Order”, Martin Gustavsson carves out a new direction in his art. A great number of paintings, closely hung together, create a multifaceted system of combinations and reading possibilities. The works merge into a continuum,...

Martin In the exhibition ”In No Particular Order”, Martin Gustavsson carves out a new direction in his art. A great number of paintings, closely hung together, create a multifaceted system of combinations and reading possibilities. The works merge into a continuum, a simultaneous then and now, with a both urgent presence and elusive absence. He uses his own artistic history in order to reformulate statements about a Being, a search of his own memory as well as of a collective one. A production of possibilities for a context viewed over time and in several dimensions. The random hanging of the paintings becomes a counter move against the circumstances we call life and the meanings we wish and believe that we can see, and make sense of, in terms of significances. The experiences we gain and exchange in our encounter with his works are a never-ending dialogue without a conclusive answer. Martin Gustavsson invites us to accompany him in his exploration to unfold deeper levels of meaning. The hanging indicates the method: turning and twisting, reversing, inspecting at close range and from a distance, the detailed, the repetitive, the essentially different. And to constantly return to the imagery that reminds us of our vulnerability, the body we revisit, the parts of a body that we see. Martin Gustavsson is one of Sweden’s most interesting artists, with a powerful integrity and personal iconography. It is with great pleasure that Gothenburg Museum of Art presents one of Sweden’s most prominent contemporary painters for its audience. ]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2011://1.101 2011-01-25T12:28:26Z 2011-01-25T12:41:50Z

Martin ]]> The Exhibition will open on the 12th of February. Inaugural speech by Carl-Otto Werkelid, Swedish Cultural Attaché in London, at 2pm. Catalogue with a new text by Ian White to follow. tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2010://1.91 2010-11-05T09:50:22Z 2010-11-05T10:16:34Z

Please join us Friday 12th November at 7pm for a conversation and performance with Martin Gustavsson and Ian White No Order In Particular is an extension, testing and live (re)configuring of the title to (and the works in) Martin...

Martin Please join us Friday 12th November at 7pm for a conversation and performance with Martin Gustavsson and Ian White No Order In Particular is an extension, testing and live (re)configuring of the title to (and the works in) Martin Gustavsson's exhibition In No Particular Order. The exhibition consists of a currently unlimited, ongoing series of paintings - wildly diverse stylistically and formally - hung in a random order, canvas-to-canvas, perhaps in such a way as to make content of the process of our production of sense. Which in and of itself, or despite ourselves, never seems to fail. Thus No Order In Particular in which the exhibition is rehung by the artist and Ian White (who are friends) while questions are asked and answered via systems that might be understood as similar.]]> ]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2010://1.85 2010-09-08T10:08:37Z 2010-10-27T14:31:11Z

In No Particular Order opens at Maria Stenfors on the 12th of October 2010. 13/10-20/11 The exhibition will also be shown at Göteborgs Museum Feb-May 2011. More info to follow....

Martin In No Particular Order opens at Maria Stenfors on the 12th of October 2010. 13/10-20/11 The exhibition will also be shown at Göteborgs Museum Feb-May 2011. More info to follow. ]]> The exhibition is a painted multitude consisting of over 70 paintings installed in a grid covering the gallery wall. In resisting aesthetic hierarchies and the immunity of the singular painting, the installation speaks of every painting’s failure to be more than the sum of its parts. Gustavsson sources a wide of range influences across both time and genres in this work. This cross-pollination of painted marks, re-framings and samples creates synchronised reference points gliding across the wall. The random combinations of these painterly parts make infinite configurations activating hidden symmetries and patterns, perpetually refiguring their individual inter-dependency. 
 In No Particular Order, returns us to the mythic dilemma of Orpheus. In failing to resist the injunction, “Don’t look back!” Orpheus becomes both tragic and a compelling figure to whom artists continually turn back. Gustavsson’s return is one that finds something other than tragedy in Orpheus’ story: a profusion of painted surfaces, with no beginning or no end, In No Particular Order witnesses the radical freedom that stems from the refusal to heed the injunctions central to contemporary culture: do not touch, do not spend, do not turn around. While such refusals may have a tragic dimension, Gustavsson’s paintings suggest that by resisting that narrative closure, we may find loops and coils, traces and skids, that bring us closer to the lost underworld. tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2009://1.74 2009-03-28T09:55:51Z 2009-03-28T10:33:08Z

17 April – 17 May Private view: 16 April, 6–9 pm The exhibition stages an encounter between artists Martin Gustavsson and Matteo Rosa, exploring the cultural and aesthetic significance of gardens and flowers, from seemingly contrasting viewpoints. Departing from...

Martin 17 April – 17 May Private view: 16 April, 6–9 pm The exhibition stages an encounter between artists Martin Gustavsson and Matteo Rosa, exploring the cultural and aesthetic significance of gardens and flowers, from seemingly contrasting viewpoints. Departing from the ancient Greek myth of Hyacinth, a lover of the god Apollo, Martin Gustavsson examines the metaphorical and formal language of representation, allegory and form, painting the image of nature as a site of desire and decay. In an essay on his work, Peggy Phelan writes that “Gustavsson makes a bid for painting’s still urgent contribution to the representation of sex and death”. The results are baroque and highly erotic canvases that oscillate between the painstakingly beautiful and the grotesque. Central to Matteo Rosa’s work is a phenomenological inquiry into the potential of human consciousness, within the context of minimalist aesthetics. In this exhibition he presents a series of videos and drawings, focusing on the contemplation of nature and impermanence. Informed by Eastern philosophy, Rosa’s work can be seen as an endeavour to extinguish desire, separation and ego. For Rosa, the garden becomes a peaceful space, which enables meditation, spiritual communion and existential development. Feed Thy Soul is an attempt at probing the split between nature and culture, reconciling the thoroughly human craving for pleasure with the quest for spiritual improvement. E:vent Gallery 96 Teesdale Street London info@eventnetwork.org.uk ]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2008://1.70 2008-11-21T08:32:32Z 2008-11-21T08:58:39Z

Dokumentation of Nils Bech singing Purcell, Handel his own material together with Bendik Giske. The performance was part of the opening of Wrath of God in Oslo 15/11....

Martin ]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2008://1.69 2008-11-18T22:22:37Z 2008-11-18T22:35:55Z

Last Saturday 15th of November Wrath of God opened at Oslo Kunstforening. At the opening Nils Bech and Bendik Giske performed a new piece in response to the paintings. The exhibition will run until 19th of December...

Martin The exhibition will run until 19th of December ]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2008://1.59 2008-09-03T17:50:11Z 2008-09-03T18:31:27Z

Oslo Kunstforening is situated in the heart of Oslo and is one of it's oldest buildings. This baroque house forms the perfect setting for the second installment of Wrath of God. It offers new possibilities of showing existing pieces...

Martin www.oslokunstforening.no click here Or you can mail marianne@oslokunstforening.no]]> tag:www.martin-gustavsson.com,2008://1.47 2008-06-24T15:21:41Z 2008-06-26T08:57:13Z

The sky seems to be the limit in "Wrath of God,” Martin Gustavsson’s painted reinterpretations of Gustave Doré’s engravings detailing the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. There is absolutely nothing modest about these canvases. The subject is of course bombastic,...

Myths of God’s punishment of his people for their sins and perversions have been the subject of countless beautiful artworks but have also inspired less exalted sentiments, among them homophobia. Gustavsson, who has also recently painted male nudes, plays with these divergent connotations, creating a painterly style simultaneously tender and violent. Here the sublime is evoked in so deliberate a manner that one cannot help but embrace the result, a gallery that seems (and smells) like an overtly licentious Sistine Chapel. ]]>