MELK

0318
Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson
Recent Works and Other Myths

Recent Works and Other Myths, 2018 Inkjet print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag, iBond and bookpage on Canson Conservation Board 35,7 x 27,6 x 3 cm

March 3 – 25 2018

MELK is proud to present a new exhibition by Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson. Recent Works and Other Myths is comprised of fifty-four collages created through a fusion of text, photography and social media. The works address the juxtaposition between text and image, the sculptural potential of photography and how context and technology has a significant impact on content. This is his second one-man show at the gallery.

For his exhibition at MELK, Jóhannsson has made a series of works bringing together well-rehearsed strategies from past endeavours, both his own and those of others. Recent Work and Other Myths combines appropriated pages from The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths—a collection of 15 essays by the influential American critic Rosalind E. Krauss—and screendumps from the artist’s Instagram account, where he has posted photos of discarded items he has stumbled across in the street. Krauss’s pages, making up the background in Jóhannsson’s collages, have been torn from used copies bought on Amazon. Each of the Instagram posts—glued on iBond platforms that have been crafted to make the image appear to be floating inside the frame—incorporate a quote from the underlying text. 

– Stian Gabrielsen (Excerpt from Clingy Citations).

Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson (b. 1977, Reykjavík, Iceland) lives and works in Oslo. Other exhibitions include “Sinking Holes, Circles, Holes and Other Holes”, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; “NORMALITY IS THE NEW AVANT-GARDE”, Kópavogur Art Museum, Gerðarsafn; “Artists‘ Books for Everything”, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen; “Dislocating Surfaces – New Scandinavian Photography”, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; “Proposals for Commissioned Work”, Bruch & Dallas, Cologne; “Books & Co.”, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills; “The Library of Babel/In and Out of Place”, Zabludowicz Collection, London; “A Book Between Two Stools”, Boghossian Foundation, Brussel; “A Narrow Scene of Hypothetical Circumstances”, Fotogalleriet, Oslo; “The Drawing Biennale”, Galleri Format, Oslo and “Norwegian Sculpture Biennale”, The Vigeland Museum, Oslo. His next artists’ book “Holes [Revisited]” will be published by Teknisk Industri in collaboration with Multinational Enterprises. In September 2018, he will be showing at Kristiansand Kunsthall.

The exhibition is supported by Fond for lyd og bilde and Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond.

MELK