MARS! / de en

Krister Klässman - Taschensteine

KRISTER KLÄSSMAN
TASCHENSTEINE

Ausstellung 07.02.2014 - 14.03.2014


MARS! is pleased to present Taschensteine, a solo exhibition by Swedish artist Krister Klässman.

Taschensteine is an investigation of ideas of time, history and human labour and their manifestation in objects, matter and space. The artist's sculptures and site-specific installations explore the passage of time and the course of human history through their poetic embodiment in quotidian materials.

Just as fossils preserve the history of the earth by holding traces and bodies recorded in stone, Krister Klässman’s sculptures preserve human presence and everyday actions. By taking the object itself away and leaving only its shell behind, what remains is a space. In this space human actions and circumstances are recorded. But unlike fossils which are dead and inanimate objects, these testimonies tell stories of poetical presences that have actually just started to exist. Freed from all duty and completely useless, these tools are joyful remains of human vitality and action recorded in stone able to last the test of time. The works tell a story of the social body as an interpretation of norms, either through their materiality or their shapes: A resin pole is made by pouring liquid resin in a sausage skin fixed around a metal bar. Filling the space between the bar and the skin, the social body comes alive, wobbling freely around the bar, expressing its own interpretation of the given structure. The connection to food - sausages - a reference to social gathering, transgressing rules of orderly behavior or interpreting them anew around the rigid given structures of life and its politics.

An additional work by the artist will be displayed in the exhibition cabinet [ ] Theresienstr. 48 | Munich opposite the Sammlung Brandhorst.


Krister Klässman (Stockholm, 1981) lives and works in London.

Selected exhibitions:

Hausfrau, COLE, London 2013; This Glitch, Blythe Gallery, London, 2013; Krister Klässman, COLE, London, 2012; Only A Suggestion, Galerie Flute Douce, Frankfurt, 2012; Arab Spring, Plaza Plaza, London, 2011; New Contemporaries, A Foundation, Liverpool/ICA, London, 2010; Bold Tendencies III, London, 2009.