Fountains of mountains
Exhibition in artagents gallery, Hamborg may 31 - july 28

 

"A room with thousand thoughts"	"Broken Kilometer"	"Touched by your presence"

-Take a closer look around the exhibition by click on image above.

- See images from the artagents after-summer-party.

- See pics from setting up works.

Fountains of mountains
by Jacob Lillemose

When you enter Nikolaj Recke's new exhibition at Art Agents Gallery the
gallery space will at first glance seem empty. And in an inverted way Frank
Stella's often quoted saying that "what you see is what you get" applies to
the exhibition. There is nothing to see in this modernist sense of the word.
But Recke has not emptied the gallery completely like Yves Klein did at
Galerie Iris Clert back in 1958, although Klein's idea of the immateriality
of art is certainly part of Recke's artistic baggage. What Recke has done is
to minimized the object hood and visual appearance of the works in various
ways in order for them to appear more clearly as conceptual interventions in
the gallery space in which a communication and an interaction between the
general context of the work and the viewer's personal history and self can
take place. The works are not desirable fetishes or definitive statements
but situations and spaces open to continuous interpretation from one viewer
to the next. Hence as Recke himself suggests one should rephrase Stella and
say that what you bring or invest is what you get.
This line of thought is presented most literally in the work which you find
in a room at the back of the gallery and which is a cooperation with
Christian Heide. When you enter the room you put on a headset microphone
that records what you say and these recordings are then played back at you
with a short delay by four loudspeakers which are placed behind a concave
white wall. The pop song-like title with its intended emotional and romantic
connotations says it all, the work is Touched by Your Presence. But also the
viewer is touched by his or her own presence. It is difficult to recognize
your voice when you hear it delayed and distorted in this way, as an echo so
to speak, and it is Recke & Heide’s honestly optimistic intention that this
subtle alienating effect will make you aware of or re-discover yourself as
both a private and public person communicating your thoughts and emotions on
globalism, relationships, art or whatever comes to your mind.
To access Touched by Your Presence you have to pass through the work Broken
Kilometer. But you might not realize this, because the only immediately
visible elements in the work are a series of small glass plates placed on
the walls a feet above the floor. In a replay of Walter de Maria's broken
kilometer in New York City Recke has "drawn" a one kilometer long laser line
from one end of the gallery space to the other. Parts of the laser line will
only appear if someone accidently blows smoke at it and as such the broken
kilometer remains an imaginary size. The work is an example of Recke's
humorous, yet serious twists of the monumental aesthetics of Land Art and
minimalism. Like the artists of these two movements he is interested in
increasing the viewer's level of perceptual consciousness, yet he is too
humble to embrace their aesthetics in full scale. So instead of making a
work that fills the gallery space his laser line lets the viewer fill it and
reconsider the distances and dimensions within it. He shifts the focus from
the exhibited object to the gallery space as a transformative, physical
site. Feel free to take a walk.
Or you can take a look out the window from Recke's own living room where he
works that he has inserted into the gallery windows facing the street. The
window is more than a biographical documentation, since it is often looking
through this window that Recke is inspired to make new work, it offers the
viewers an opportunity to reflect upon the moment of creation. Installed at
Art Agents Gallery the window frames a piece of reality unfolding on the
street outside. Metaphorically speaking the window works as a transparent
membrane between the inside and outside and Recke is saying that this is
where art (and the art of living) begins, by paying attention to the
surrounding world and connecting it with ones inner self.
Recke is also taking a good look in a series of computer drawings made from
photographs of his friends and fellow artists in everyday situations. The
subject matter of the drawings is not the psychology of the persons depicted
but the eyes that see, in this case Recke's, and how they relate to the
persons through the drawing process.

Jakob Lillemose 2002