Andreas Albrectsen: Untitled (White Lie), 2015, Charcoal on Paper, 114x146 cm

Paramnesia

Andreas Albrectsen

23.10 - 21.11.2015

Opening: 23.10 2015, 5-8pm


Drawing is the preferred medium of Andreas Albrectsen. Typically pencil and charcoal on paper. Black and white. The motifs are taken from the artist’s private archive of photographic images – a physical archive, as well as a digital archive collected from searches on the Internet. The first saved and secondly revised photographic images end up in Albrectsen’s drawings as images in a third potency – we have the original photo, the depiction thereof, and, at last, the drawing. At some point in the transit, through the original, the Google-depiction to the drawing, the context is lost, and it is exactly this autonomy he finds interesting. Using the drawing as a rhetorical tool, Albrectsen narrates a new and more personal story about the image, though concurrently assuring a transparent presence of the initial one. It is a gentle play of letting the past, the history and the context having a symbolical presence in the grand white surface surrounding the drawing.

For his first large scale solo show at Galleri Tom Christoffersen, Andreas Albrectsen has collected historical traces witnessing a dark chapter in a common European past. Bullet holes found in monuments and exisiting facades are transferred through a frottage technique onto chalk paper, and presented as a transparent memorial of repressed memories absorbed by the city. Meanwhile, fragments from the layers of spray paint added throughout 26 years covering the remains of the Berlin wall, is presented on the floor as a materialized oblivion and represents the time of Albrectsen’s own generation. Alongside the two above-mentioned works, three new and larger charcoal and pencil drawings are shown. One of the works Untitled (White Lie) is a motif from the Classical Mythology – the symbol between the reason and the unreason – processed by dividing the sketch and recollecting the parts out of order to be meticulously reproduced at last in the drawing. The further two large drawings Projections II-III revolves around the function of the Rorschach test: about mapping out hidden memories and thought processes by associations made from an abstract and harmless picture.


“We believe that we know what we remember and what we prefer to forget, collectively as well as individually. Andreas Albrectsen shakes these beliefs and throws us into a state of healthy and necessary uncertainty. This is yet another of the potentials of art: forcing us away from self-righteous self-assuredness, forcing us to look at the things we do not want to see.”

- Gertrud Sandqvist, Rector at Malmö Art Academy in ” Andreas Albrectsen - Paramnesia”.

Andreas Albrectsen (b. 1986) graduated from Malmö Art Academy, 2013. Recent exhibitions: These Walls, Galleri Jacob Bjørn, Århus and The Hot Show, Galleri Nicolai Wallner, 2015. Understrøm – Ung Nordisk Kunst, ARoS Aarhus kunstmuseum, 2014. 24 Spaces, Malmö Konsthall og Rummets Rymd - Species of Space, Skissernas museum, Lund, 2013 . In 2013 he debuted in Copenhagen with the solo show The End at Galleri Tom Christoffersen.

Andreas Albrectsen: Untitled (White Lie). 2015, Charcoal on Paper, 114x146 cm (detail)  

Andreas Albrectsen: Projections II, 2015, Graphite on paper, 146 x 114 cm  

Andreas Albrectsen: Projections III, 2015, Graphite on paper, 117 x 92 cm  

Paramnesia. Installation View.  

Paramnesia. Installation View.  

Paramnesia. Installation View.  

Paramnesia. Installation View.  

Andreas Albrectsen: Calibergraphy, 2015, Bullet holes found in monuments in Wroclaw and Berlin Graphite frottage on tracing paper, 41,7 x 36 cm x 27  

Andreas Albrectsen: Calibergraphy (1), 2015, Bullet holes found in monuments in Wroclaw and Berlin Graphite frottage on tracing paper, 41,7 x 36 cm x 27  

Andreas Albrectsen: Calibergraphy (2), 2015, Bullet holes found in monuments in Wroclaw and Berlin Graphite frottage on tracing paper, 41,7 x 36 cm x 27