Daydreams and mindfulness at Stockholm's galleries
DN MAGNUS BONS
PUBLISHED 2023-01-21
The spring season has started strongly at Stockholm's galleries. Magnus Bons makes a round and finds a common thread in a dreamlike and contemplative expression, perhaps a response to a troubled time with war and pandemic.
A dreamlike and contemplative element is evident in several of the artists who inaugurate the new season at Stockholm's galleries. I see how inner worlds respond to the outer, how intention meets chance. Regardless of whether it is about traditional materials or works made in the latest technology.
But unlike André Nordström's narrative images, fragmentary works consider the border between extinction and becoming. Are the introspection and this oscillation between life and death reactions to a troubled time or effects of the pandemic? In any case, I observe a renewed desire for concentration and deepening in contact with the material.
War also forms the indirect scene in Karl Dunér's concentrated exhibition at Galleri Duerr, where a frieze of long narrow images holds the room and the viewer in a firm grip. There are around thirty photographs and paintings on rolled aluminium, toned-down images based on translated fragments of the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus' play "The Myrmidons". The play takes place on the battlefield outside Troy, but rather than illustrating the lines, Dunér succeeds in portraying the feeling of loss.
In one fragment, the warlord Achilles says: “Antilochus, weep more for the living than for the dead. All mine is gone now.” In the exhibition, it is linked to one of the torn paintings, where remnants of thin fabric and black spots of paint are all that remain. And in the still mist of the photographs, houses and tree canopies shape their outlines against the
night sky. Street lights flicker in the dark, and it's as if the photos capture and reflect the field of vision of an unknown person.
The title "Paraboles" suggests that the bowl-shaped images are a kind of receiver. The eyes of the unidentified have observed the faint light. Are these the last images, memories that are about to fade?
Karl Dunér's end point has its opposite in Jerónimo Rüedi's exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake. Because in the Mexican artist's atmospheric works, painting starts from scratch.
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"Eyes and ears" Darkly enigmatic images unsettle the eye
Svenska Dagbladet, Svd, Joanna Persman Published 2023-01-28
Jenny Källman's installation with shadow play-like reflections and a suite of new photographs fascinates with its enigmatic nature. The same can be said of Karl Dunér's evocative images based on ancient text fragments.
An exhibition with many layers is also shown at Galleri Duerr. It all started on an ancient rubbish heap, discovered in 1896 during the excavations of the city of Oxyrhynchos in central Egypt. Fragments of apocryphal and biblical texts, poems by Sappho, pieces of papyrus by Homer and Euclid were found here. Thus, fragments attributed to Aeschylus' lost play "The Myrmidons", which takes place during the Trojan War, were also discovered.
This is the starting point for the exhibition "Paraboles". Jan Stolpe and Lars-Håkan Svensson have translated fragments that can be connected to the play. Karl Dunér is responsible for the visual design and has created 33 aluminum shells with photos and paintings with the lines from the "Myrmidons" as titles.
It works fine in the publication that Ellerströms Text & Musik Förlag has published in a limited edition. The textual fragments, reinforced by necessary comments, correspond with Dunér's evocative images, which suggest more than they show. They are rather scenes for moods than for events.
In the spacious gallery, however, the visual language feels more distant from the play. The gaze is drawn curiously into the unusual form and materiality of the images. The blurred figures also seem to carry their own stories. Here the connection to the "Myrmidons" is more difficult to maintain. Could the text fragments and Dunér's enlarged images work together on a theater stage? This remains to be dreamed about.
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DN's critics choose five favorites, week 4 Exhibition. Karl Dunér "Parabolas"
published 2023-01-29
Galleri Duerr, Stockholm
Karl Dunér is known as a theater director, but in recent years has received more and more attention as an artist, most recently two years ago at Waldemarsudde. The unique exhibition with mechanical dolls and sculptural objects had an enigmatic atmosphere that is repeated in Dunér's new, skilfully staged suite "Parabols" at Galleri Duerr. A total of 29 works are based on fragments from the ancient play "The Myrmidons", which takes place on the battlefield outside Troy and is now also published in a Swedish translation (Ellerström's publisher). The series' photos and paintings on rolled aluminum are curved like parabolas, and these night images are darkly mysterious and melancholic. —Birgitta Rubin
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