VOLTA 5 BASEL / One Man Show with Theis Wendt
It is with great pleasure to announce that Galleri Christoffer Egelund is participating at Volta 5.
The gallery will present a one man show with the young emerging artist Theis Wendt, which graduated last year from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Theis Wendt has for the last 6 month put all his energy on producing new wonderful works to be displayed on his solo show in Basel. The result is twelve really good, strong drawings – I look very much forward to present the works to collector and friends.
If you are in Basel please visit Volta Show Booth H5 from Monday, June 8th – Saturday 13th, 2009. The address is Markthalle – Viaduktstrasse 10 – 4054 Basel, Switzerland.
I hope to see you in Basel and look forward to welcome you to our booth (H5).
I have a painting by Theis Wendt one of his earlier works – I bought it in 2001 and I love the paiting “Keep it Street” I enjoy the work every day and visitors also allways commen on the works and thats fantastic.
The colors are bright and overflowing, a firework of light and joy, playfulness and phantasm, a searing pink, a loud blue, a glistening yellow, a deep red, a rainbow of child play and explosive energy, a man empties his insides on the living room floor.
The figures are comical, the buildings are curious, the characters naively recognizable, the situation is witty and the scenario stirs up a laughter, a man is being lynched by two hooded executioners.
The composition is crisp, the lines are intriguingly puzzling, the depth is tricking the eye, the details are stealthy and calculated, a catapult is launching severed heads into an armored castle.
Behind the fortress walls monstrous creatures are feasting on children dolls with pouched lips, big eyes, tight boobs and heavy makeup. Pirate ships are cruising sickly waters, loaded with faceless snipers, Lego demons and tabloid devils. Wars are being waged in dreamy forests between fantasy monsters and plastic tanks, the soldiers ranging from action force figures to dismantled celebrities. The scenarios question the position of the real. The appropriated elements from our existing world, constantly battles the made-up elements, in a tournament of the right to claim the fantasy realm. Where does fantasy begin and where does reality actually end?
The spaces are deform conceptions of adult nurseries, where human beings learn to exist among one another and maneuver appropriate in society, a learning process bathing in voluptuous erotic misconceptions, bland violent behavior and a grotesque madness of flaws and failures.
But there is something further to explore, there seems to be something leading beyond the nauseatingly, all-consuming tableaus. There seems to be a hole. It shifts around. It moves in dodging swirls amongst the battles, orgies and rituals; a hole that might be a cave, a portal, a wormhole, a faceless person, a separate place or at least the proposition for an escape route, a way beyond and beneath the suffocating displays of human nature run astray.
The presence of these holes, gaps and cracks offers the existing of alternative opportunities. Perhaps the monsters are helpers, focusing our rage, our dreams, our ambitions and our drives? Perhaps the crooked houses are actually pleasant living quarters fitting those that normally do not fit? Perhaps the violence is answers written in a language still to be translated? Perhaps the depraved, the perverted, the adolescent and immoral is a means to bring back the notion of right? Perhaps the filth is fertilizer for beauty?
Untitled Scenario
Mon, 05/19/2008 – 16:54 — theis
UNTITLED SCENARIO
Installation
Shown at the royal danish art academy’ graduating Exit show in GL. Strand 2008
In untitled scenario an office environment and a colourful plastic ball playground have merged together in one room. I choose the office for it’s symbolic effect, for something with great seriousity, with a strictly defined structure and a space that would lead the audiences mind against some kind of working space, a space for adults. I also choose the office because of the context of the exhibition. Most of the graduating art students will after this show be faced by society through an office, because of economical problems. If you choose to get economical help from the government, as an artist, you will have to deal with a system that doesn’t appreciate your kind of business. I choose the plastic ball playground for it’s symbolic effect, for something playful, with no defined structure and a space that would lead the audiences mind against some kind of playful space, or compared to the office, a room for kids. A space normally seen in big concerns like Ikea or McDonalds, where parents install their children while shopping. By decontextualizing the playground into an art space you could understand the exhibition space as a business parallel to a firm like Ikea, drawing that parallel raises questions about the art market and the big hype for young graduating art students in Denmark these days. Like the rest of the country Copenhagen has become rich and the prices for getting an apartment, a room or any kind of space is incredibly high. That makes it very hard for artist to exhibit works that are out side commercial art market interests, because of lag of space. That of course puts economical pressure on artists, maybe forcing them to rethink their ideals.
With most of my projects I wish to raise questions about space and human behaviours, what is a space and what impact does it have on the ones who enter it and why? What is an office and how would it work together with 20000 colourful plastic balls and how would the people working there behave? If you look closer on the objects you will see that none of the electronic devises are connected and the furniture is installed on the balls not the other way around, which transforms them into empty, flowing, humours objects with no greater hierarchical status than the balls on the floor. By throwing office furniture and balls into an exhibition space one of cause have to realise that this is shown in an art context, there for commenting on the structure around the space as well as in it. I would like the audience to perceive untitled scenario as a possible situation where people can meet, talk, think and act differently than the architectural, historical and hierarchical structures dictates.
Exit or entrance
Tue, 03/18/2008 – 13:39 — theis Click the images below for bigger versions:
EXIT OR ENTRANCE
site-specific installation Bergen (Norway) 2007
20 people from Reykjavik, Bergen and Copenhagen were invited to exhibit in bjørgvin state prison in Norway. (The prison have an open structure, allowing some inmates ones in a while to leave the prison area for a restricted period of time) The idea was to create a piece that could be seen as an image or used as an installation with interactive possibilities. By putting colourful ladders on the outside of this depressive place, i was trying to raise questions about the structures of the area, and the structured behavioral systems forced in the minds of the inmates. If you look closer on the ladders you can see that many of them not really leads towards an exit or entrance, but are floating in a space between in and out, thus staging an idea of freedom.