SOPHIE TAPPEINER

For their participation at Spark, SOPHIE TAPPEINER presents Lone Haugaard Madsen. Rum#356 (2019) has initially been created for an outdoor exhibition at Kunstscenen.yxz in Copenhagen in 2019. For this exhibition Lone Haugaard Madsen has cast a small section of the lawn in front of the art space and transferred the resulting space-fragment to the open white cube. It is a seemingly simple and direct gesture, where the work’s form is determined by the process more than by the artists‘ hand. But the simplicity of the action is relating to a complexity of questions about what a public art space is and how meaning is produced. Somehow the questioning is here pushed to the extremes because the art frame is less defined in advance and the line between art and nonart is constantly moving. But what might be the meaning behind the gesture of casting part of the ground? To begin with it may bring into focus what is normally deemed unimportant, as something to think about and look at from a new perspective. It is also a way of turning an uneven topographical surface that changes day by day into a kind of monument – capturing a moment in time. Soil in itself is fundamental for all life and for the atmosphere: as a medium for plant growth, as a container for water, micro-organisms and minerals. At the same time nothing and everything? More pragmatically this piece of ground represents a basis for Kunstscenen’s construction, the platform on which art is exhibited. Here, this negative space is placed within the fair’s architecture, and heaven and earth is turned upside down.

Lone Haugaard Madsen’s (*1974 in Silkeborg, Denmark, lives and works between Copenhagen and Vienna) expansive yet precise installations enter a never-ending cycle of artistic production/reproduction and presentation/representation, and further help to shape it. Using sculptural as well as painterly means in a spatial-installative way she questions the production of art itself. In her practice, Haugaard Madsen makes visible and negotiates the conditions around the production of culture, meaning, and value. Material aspects of production thereby serve as her starting point: her works often consist of objects that have accumulated in her own working space or that she finds in the studios of artist friends or in the workshops and warehouses of art institutions. She collects materials and objects, subjects them to a process of reinterpretation and transforms them until a network-like hybrid emerges that makes the complex interrelationships of art-making tangible.

SOPHIE TAPPEINER is a Vienna-based gallery that opened in May 2017. It is a critically engaged space which has developed a strong focus on intersectional feminism, the body and how our being relates with and impacts on the world around us. The aesthetic of the program is based deeply within the logic of each artist’s practice yet shares a tendency towards explorational materiality and a strong sense of figurative presence.