Closed room door opener from the past

ART: When is a door no longer a door? The new gallery at Galleri Opdahl provides new entries, writes reviewer Aftenbladet.

an offer

Opdahl Gallery: Piotr Lakomy, entrance. Skulptur, Tom 31. okt.

When is a door no longer a door? The practical function has a door only when it indicates a divider, a corridor, between two rooms, or between the outside and the inside. The door leaf allows opening and closing this passage. But if the door leaf is moved outside this practical context, then completely different points of view will be needed to be interesting.

Polish Piotr Lakomy gives us new entrances to the door, whether as a tangible object, material or idea. In Galleri Opdahl, he displays 10 sculptures based partly on his studio, partly on the theories of Austrian-American architect Friedrich Kessler and his work with the Infinite House (mid-last century). Kessler wanted organic forms, originally based on the egg, and the space experience was supposed to be fluid and based on the human standard, body proportions.

bees and ostriches

Bees and Ostrich: Lacomy brings these theories to a postmodern mindset. Thus he creates unclean art far from the ideals of modernity. His starting points are the egg and what he calls the original shape of the house, the beehive cells. But although his sculptures obviously contain a fascination with nature’s own shapes and materials, he uses artificial beehive cells, stretching and shaped into constructive sculptural elements – that is, based on the idea of ​​nature’s powerful building cells, but here he removed a good distance from nature itself . This becomes an architectural element in some of his sculptures. In stark contrast to the ostrich eggs he lays semi-floating in these things.

An ostrich egg appears as a ground handle or latch, but the egg is fragile, and can hardly withstand touch and break easily – a contradiction that also contains the idea that the egg is another primitive form of the house. In this way, Lacome turns the door into a metaphor for use in the house, as he suspends the house itself outside the door. Thus these sculptures also became an opening for the closed chambers of the past. On one level, I see here the fingerprints of the people who used these doors in their time, these parts of life – containing the memories of the passages that were opened and closed, of those who once stood before this movement, with titles like “She was a visitor” and “Tears of Eggs” “. It is as if the uneven surfaces of things, in the boundary zone between sculpture and painting, show me traces of people who used doors I had never seen myself, traces stuck and coagulated, now preserved only as memories, in this fluid state between concrete and abstract, clear and indistinct.

depression

Yes, here also lies an element of sadness, the experience of something lost, something that is irretrievably finished. But here is also a free game with materials and shapes, obviously related to German-American Eva Hess, who suddenly matured as an artist in the latter half of the 1960s, before her very soon death. She pioneered the work of freeing art from obvious categories, styles, and trends, pointing the nose to contemporary art trends—abstract expressionism, pop art, and concept art—and making unclean things with poor, sloppy materials like. He did not recognize the boundaries between sculpture and painting.

The great importance that Hess had for newer art, we see clear traces in Lacomy, where, in addition to the materials already mentioned, ia use rabbit fur, synthetic resin, concrete, door lock, textiles, aluminum can, beeswax, glue and paint in their bodies. Today, Hess’ innovations are a normal thing, but it is not normal that today’s artists can draw on this heritage as well as what we see now in the Galleri Opdahl.