Exhibition
Maritin Gustavsson - In No Particular Order - Maria Stenfors
Maria Stenfors is pleased to present a new series of paintings by Swedish artist Martin Gustavsson.
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 has included wide influences for this body of work both across time and genre. This cross-pollination of painted marks, re-framings and samples creates synchronized 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.
Martin Gustavsson (b. 1964, Sweden) lives and works in London, UK. Gustavsson was educated both at The Royal University Collage of Fine Art in Stockholm, Sweden and at Middlesex University, UK. His works have been exhibited in Scandinavia as well as in the UK, Japan, USA and the Middle East. Recent solo exhibitions include Wrath of God, Oslo Kunstforening, Norway and Brändström & Stene, Stockholm, 2008 and 2007. He lectures at Umeå University, Sweden and held the IASPIS residencies in New York (1999-2000) and Stockholm (2007). In February 2011 he will have a solo exhibition at Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden, where a larger installation of In No Particular Order will be shown.
For further images or information please contact the gallery.
Follow us on http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=288931887364&ref=ts
