Pressrelease

Lars Arrhenius

Animated

14.4. - 16.6.2007

Gallery fiedler contemporary opens on Friday, 13 April 2007, the first solo show of the Swedish artist Lars Arrhenius in Germany.
His work consists of serial, graphic installations and animations that merge a diagrammatic with a social narrative. This exhibition includes several large works where small cibachrome prints mounted on panels are placed in puzzle or map-like configurations (The man without qualities, 2001; A – Z, 2002) or fuse and appear on a single surface (Zoo, 2005) and the latest digital animations (Habitat, 2006; Murmurs of earth, 2006).
Arrhenius often uses pictograms, the kind of stereotypical figures and universal symbols seen on public information signs. He transforms them or takes them as a initial point for telling a story.
In HABITAT we are invited to follow nine people and a dog living in a three storey house. No one is playing the leading part, everybodys stories intervene with eachother. It’s an urban drama that mixes everyday life with absurdity, humour and seriousness.
THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, a large scale installation on the opposite walls of the gallery, revolves around the individual - and the possible variations of an everyman’s life from his birth to his death. The images are sampled and own invented pictographs. By putting just a few of these symbols together, a more complex narrative structure could be developed. This global informative and pedagogic visual language makes it easy to identify with his character.
The piece A – Z presents a map depicting London. Placed on the map are 264 circle shaped pictures, in a pattern that reminds us of a tube map or a playing board. These circles are filled with 18 main character’s lives. Their lifes cross and interfere with each other’s paths and create new courses of events. The characters are all from different backgrounds, ages, classes, ethnic0 and even species. Everyone is participating to tell the story about the organism that we call the City.
The wallpiece ZOO portraits the inhabitants of a building – all at the same time and during their everyday-life. The eight-storeyed building where they live is invisible, the context in a way universal – and the spectator left in doubt whether the image is not perhaps dealing about one individual instead of a lot of people’s life.
MURMURS OF EARTH is a concise story of the Creation. The film portrays the story of the earth and its future as it could be catched and summerized on a radar some million light years away. The title ‚Mumurs of Earth’ is borrowed from the two discs that was sent out in space with the Voyagerexpedition 1977. The discs are a sort of outer space message-in-a-bottle that contains images, music and other information that presents humanity to other life in the Universe. This fantastic and naive idea is refering to the golden age of science-fiction in the seventies and their films such as Moonbase Alfa, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars.

Lars Arrhenius is represented in the collections of the Moderna Museet and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Malmö Konstmuseum and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.