In No Particular Order
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.