Untitled, from the series: Poster Painting

In her multifaceted and rebellious artistic practice, Klara Lidén engages with almost everything (and anything) around herself – from the architectural space she intervenes with to the materials and objects that have either been discarded or that are so much part of the urban landscape they’d usually go unnoticed.

In her quasi-anarchic reinterpretation of space and matter, Lidén, thus, offers a fresh take on the decades-long tradition of elevating everyday objects into the realm of art, a method famously propagated by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), repurposing their functions and meanings to people as well as the environments they find themselves in.

In her unique inquiry of the urban landscape and our human response to it, Lidén subsequently often makes use of discarded items that she finds on the streets. Lidén has stated (Klara Liden: The Myth of Progress, exhibition catalogue, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2013) how ‘use, most of the time, means diverting materials or spaces from their prescribed functions, inventing ways of making things improper again…building is also un-building, recycling or improvising new uses for what’s already been set up’.

The prime example of Lidén’s work in this field is found in her iconic and poetic series of Poster Paintings, for which the artist uses layers and layers (piled one on top of another until the artist’s desired thickness is reached) of old advertising posters found on the streets. Glued together and having weathered rain and sun throughout time, the edges of the works are crumpled and jagged, as if rebelling against the glue that holds them together onto the wall.

The Untitled works that make up the Poster Paintings series have been described as reminders of the impermanence of things, where a specific event (marketed on the poster in question) is replaced -covered- by the next. The pasted posters, now simple mementos of the events they once advertised, are in fact a compilation of the social gatherings that have happened during a particular time and in a particular place, a concealed diary of a city’s vibrant life.

The stack of posters, which once advertised concerts, exhibitions or even objects for sale, have (like the detritus of an urban landscape) been covered up by a final, white layer (blanking out the specifics of any time or location) by the artist, who in this way transforms the display nature of the simple banners and turns the finished work into a white monochrome, bringing associations with Arte Povera and Minimalism to mind (Lidén has previously pasted blank paper over advertising hoardings in Copenhagen and, in a grand gesture, once famously worked overnight to remove all the billboard posters in Stockholm).

We may want to try and remember what those posters stand for, what they advertise, delving into our memories to awaken past experiences, but we are prevented from doing so by the blank layer the artist added at the end. Lidén’s Poster Paintings can therefore be regarded as a souvenir of our past, but also a gentle reminder that the future is a blank canvas.

Lidén’s act of appropriation, in her use of recycled posters, also evidences and critiques the culture of rapid consumption and disposal that we live in and questions, as pointed out by Vaari Claffey, Rachael Thomas and Karen Sweeney (Klara Liden: The Myth of Progress, exhibition catalogue, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2013), our roles as human beings in it:

The Poster Paintings archive the advertisements that intersperse, and increasingly encroach upon, urban life. Simultaneously reflecting on the waste inherent in consumerism and on societal values, while harnessing the possibilities of the materials employed, they engage the viewer and ultimately allow for an open-ended dialogue with the work.

Firestorm Foundation’s Untitled (from the series Poster Painting)was originally part of the Bert Kreuk Collection (acquired directly from Galerie Neu, Berlin, in 2013). When key works from that collection were given a show of their own, in the exhibition Transforming the Known. Works from the Bert Kreuk Collection at theGemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague (8 June - 29 September 2013), US-based Dutch entrepreneur Bert Kreuk’s (born 1964) importance, as a collector, was emphasised by Mark Rappolt (‘Bert Kreuk’, ArtReview, 2013):

Over the past few decades, a US-based Dutch businessman, Bert Kreuk, has assembled one of the most impressive collections of contemporary art anywhere in the world. It includes works by big-name artists such as Christopher Wool, Jeff Koons, Luc Tuymans and Damien Hirst, as well as more recent stars such as Matthew Day Jackson, Theaster Gates, Danh Vō, Klara Lidén and Kaari Upson.

In the museum’s introduction to the exhibition, Kreuk himself elaborated on the significance he ascribed to the artists on display:

It is a liberating feeling once you discover that art is more than a mere reflection of reality. Collecting art for me is an educational journey of exploring, observing and understanding, without learned assumptions. The artists in my collection have the ability to give a personal, intentional and authentic expression to their concept. They should have the wish to communicate an idea beyond the illustration of a scene or an instantly identifiable mood. They extend boundaries and disrupt conventional ideas about art, and as such they are ‘transforming the known’.

Provenance

Galerie Neu, Berlin.

Bert Kreuk Collection (acquired directly from the above).

Firestorm Foundation.

Exhibitions

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Transforming the Known. Works from the Bert Kreuk Collection, 8 June - 29 September 2013.