Christian Andersson

From Lucy with love

22.1 2011 – 24.4 2011

Malmö

Moderna Museet Malmö starts the year with an exhibition of the Malmö-based artist Christian Andersson. His largest solo show so far – From Lucy with love – will fill the entire Turbine Hall with several new works, presenting visitors with one of the most complex oeuvres in Swedish contemporary art.

Christian Andersson offers an alternative interpretation of truth in his oeuvre. He wants to show the onlooker that there are more perspectives than one on reality and our history. Andersson brings out the forgotten or repressed facts and presents them in his own way, often challenging our routine thought patterns.

From Lucy with love is Christian Andersson’s (b. 1973) largest solo exhibition to date, featuring several new works in the turbine hall of Moderna Museet Malmö. Visitors are invited into a limbo, between a modernist utopia and a surrealist dream in the form of a monumental sculpture. In the middle of the exhibition space is a sort of incomplete timeline, a contemporary curiosity cabinet, where the artist destabilises the museum’s power and role as upholder of the truth. Andersson triggers fleeting doubts in order to put our powers of perception to the test, juxtaposing sense and sensibility.

Christian Andersson presents a panoply of references. Specific art historic references to Magritte and surrealism in the exhibition’s largest work are interspersed with more implicit allusions to conspiracy theories and literature. The clearest link is perhaps the one to the architect Mies van der Rohe and his Barcelona pavilion, which was demolished in 1930 and reconstructed in 1980 on the exact same site in Barcelona. Christian Andersson, in turn, has constructed an abstract replica of part of the pavilion for his exhibition at Moderna Museet Malmö. History, the modernist utopian dream, is consciously repeated a third time.

Christian Andersson was born in Stockholm in 1973 and now lives and works in Malmö. He graduated from the Malmö Art Academy in 2001 and has exhibited profusely in Europe and the USA.

A richly illustrated catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition at Moderna Museet Malmö, featuring an essay by freelance curator/critic Chris Sharp, a new poem by the author Aris Fioretos and an e-mail dialogue between the artist and the assistant curator Andreas Nilsson.

The exhibition is produced by Moderna Museet Malmö.

Curators: Magnus Jensner and Andreas Nilsson