Ulf Rollof, Sövd 9 Sövd (Anaesthetised 9) , 2005 © Ulf Rollof

Moment – Ulf Rollof

8.11 2011 – 12.2 2012

Stockholm

Ulf Rollof (Swedish, born 1961) gained international recognition early in his career, exhibiting all over the world, including Europe, Latin America, Canada, Japan and India. The works in Moment belong to a cycle that is mainly about learning to accept a situation that appears inescapable. It concerns revaluations, breaking free from restricting conditions and beliefs. Ulf Rollof bases his art on personal experiences. However, rather than being absorbed by private issues, he creates powerful universal images.

Sövd (Anaesthetised) is a series of ten photographical diptychs where the artist has matched a photo from a shoulder operation with another picture. The second image initially appears to have nothing in common with the op picture. It could be an interior showing a bed in a palatial chamber, or a picture of people using their healthy arms. After studying them more carefully, however, secret links between the images reveal themselves. These are never logical, consisting, perhaps, merely of similarities in form, colour or composition. They raise the question of how we actually perceive and read the world around us. The artist establishes associative connections between disparate events and thus the imagined universality of our habitual perspective is lost. New ways of looking at the world appear equally possible.

In the three large triptychs in the series RGB (Red Green Blue) the beautiful, shiny and even surface is brutally destroyed by three perfectly-aimed gun shots. The bullets have penetrated the glass and shattered it. But the bullet holes that appear at first glance to be the result of a violent action, reveal an unexpected beauty at closer examination: behind the closed surface, surrounded by the radiating cracks in the glass, we find an opening towards an unknown dimension. Although it lies in darkness, it could nevertheless provide a way out of that very darkness.

In Madopark, an installation consisting of two steel security doors, of which one has been blasted open. Madopark is the name of the medicine that unlocked the door back into life for the artist; the blasted door thus marks the start of a new chapter.

Curator: Iris Müller-Westermann