24 Sep 2010

Matts Leiderstam and Imre Nagy at Grazer Kunstverein

Matts Leiderstam: Grand Tour
Matts Leiderstam (*1956) lives and works in Stockholm.

In a picture gallery it rarely occurs to you that everything could equally be hung quite differently. The museum and other institutions involved in constructing art history are hardly interested in this relativisation of their work. The consensus as to what is mastery and why is created chiefly by an ostensibly objective rhetoric that does not allow mistakes, misunderstandings and individual wishes to become visible.

The work of Swedish artist Matts Leiderstam, however, thrives on creating constant productive confusion in this canonical order. His methods are borrowed from the tools of the art historian: rehanging pictures, copying pictures, visualizing the provenance of an art work, examining the history of a picture's restoration, or enlarging and presenting isolated details of pictures… Picture galleries, catalogues and libraries provide the source material for his work, with which he draws the viewers' attention to the repressed sexual, personal and power-political subtexts of art works.

Curator: Søren Grammel


Imre Nagy: Koffeinmodus
At the Studio of the Grazer Kunstverein, Imre Nagy (*1975) shows new works.

The artist uses materials such as wood, paper, adhesive tape or plexiglass to produce sculptures. Through subtle interventions and combinations, they appear fragile and exemplary. The patterns of their construction sometimes recall permeability and openness of earlier modernistic space experiments. The choice of ephemeral building material relativizes this reference by adding a speculative and temporary attitude.

Nagy's works produce formal as well as content-related relationships between spacial-architectural and spiritual areas of practices. The quality of these relationships is manifested in their instability which is deliberately open for permanent modification and interrogation.
At second sight, some of the works in the Graz presentation put into relationship between contentual and formal aspects of the surrounding space; either with one of the publications displayed in the Studio, or with one part of the furniture of the gallery.