MMP: Tor-Magnus Lundeby

His installation relates directly to the DJ and club culture and is constructed like an intimate record shop for DJ Loony. DJ Loony is one of the 132 figures in the psychedelic painting from 1998, which is both part of the installation and its point of departure.

In addition to the painting “Loony in the sky with DJs”, the installation consists of dummy-CDs, a shelf for CDs shaped like a model of a Japanese box hotel, a suite of eight monochrome paintings and a wall with figures representing artists attached to the Berlin-based record company, Bungalow. In an adjacent room visitors can browse among various record companies and the artist’s own favourite bands – e.g. Andreas Dorau, U2, Stereolab, Air, the Beatles – with the help of a computer placed on a specially-constructed table.

Just as CDs and singles are made with different mixes based on an original version, Tor-Magnus Lundeby’s installation contains different parts or stations, which to a greater or lesser extent are reused or become variations upon the original. For example, the main painting’s armada of imaginary space ships returns as individual figures on one of the walls in the room. In the dummy CD, whose cover consists of the painting, are photocopies of the artist’s paintings and sketches for them. His own work is also mixed with techno-culture’s visual and other references. The links between the artist’s work and the ambient scene are so close that Bungalow has given one of his paintings a catalogue number (Bung 088).

The imagination prevailing in Tor-Magnus Lundeby’s visual world is wide-ranging and motifs can derive from both TV games and astronomy. He oscillates between figuration and non-figuration when he has Star Wars meet Skansen’s terrarium. He often borrows titles from song titles and record jackets. The technique of using brush pens and compasses harks back to a boy’s room. The aesthetic recalls Lundeby’s own childhood during the late 60s and early 70s with that period’s colourfulness and decorative clarity, hedonism and escapism. One of his large tusch drawings, Monstropolis from 1998, looks at a distance like a monster face, but closer up is revealed to be a detailed map of a gigantic city. Although Lundeby’s perspective is often from outer space, his paintings have elements of private, inner pictures.

Tor-Magnus Lundeby was born in 1966 in Fredrikstad in Norway, where he recently had a one-man show at Östfold Kunstnersenter. At the moment he resides in Helsingfors.

Curator: Maria Lind