Ethereal Signifiers
Hanna Hansdotter, Gretta Louw, Juno Rothaug
28 Jan. – 4 Mar. 2023
Future Gallery is proud to present Ethereal Signifiers featuring new work by Hanna Hansdotter, Gretta Louw, and Juno Rothaug.
Ethereal Signifiers is an exploration of artworks existing at the precipice of figuration and abstraction. In the case of Hansdotter, she is creating amorphous corporeal bodies out of molten glass. Through a combination of processes, both digital and handcrafted, Louw explores the relationship between algorithmic image generation and human mark making. In her large scale canvases, Rothaug deconstructs once pronounced images into fragmented painterly abstract compositions. These artists, each through their distinct medium, create an ethereal space in between between discernible form and imaginative visualisation. The resulting artworks are bold, complex, and gestural positions that challenge the border of abstraction.
Hanna Hansdotter (1984*) lives and works in Småland, Sweden. She holds a BFA from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design (Stockholm, SE) and received her glass blowing qualifications from Kosta Glass Center (Kosta, SE). Her work is represented in the permanent collection of Sweden’s National Museum of Fine Arts, the collection of The Public Art Agency Sweden and several private collections.
Her decadently voluptuous sculptures are produced by blowing molten glass into specially molded iron frameworks that give the glass its intended pattern. The sculpture is then left to settle into whichever shape it happens to assume, ensuring that even editioned work is unique. Her practice is a self-described exploration of the nexus between craft and mass production. Industrial production methods guided by artistic intentions.
Gretta Louw (1981*) is a multi-disciplinary artist who has worked with artforms as varied as digital media and networked performance, installation and video art, and fibre art. She lives and works in Germany and Australia. Her artistic practice explores the potential of art as a means of investigating psychological phenomena, particularly in relation to new technologies and the internet. Her focus is on how new digital technologies are shaping contemporary experience.
The series comes out of a long term interest in the visual language of the digital, internet vernacular, and thinking about how to envisage not only digitalisation but also organic and non-human networks in a more embodied, visceral, and Earth-bound manner. The Medusa Banners represent a conversation between imagery derived from an iterative process working with a variety of digital and algorithmic tools on the one hand, and a range of traditional needlework and textile techniques on the other. This juxtaposition between digital and analogue production methods speaks to the utterly 21st-century tensions between sensuality and efficiency; embodiment and automation; constant digital connectedness and corporeal dislocation; the technosphere and the biosphere.
Juno Rothaug (1999*) lives and works in Hamburg. She is currently studying in the class of Anselm Reyle at the HFBK Hamburg.
Juno Rothaug’s works are created with the starting point of a narrative or figurative idea, from the most diverse areas of her life, from her own biography and from history – she draws references from literature, pop culture and art history. In the beginning, the artist roughly lays out the picture’s structure on the painting surface, but without applying a precise preliminary sketch, rather setting focal points, exploring relationships or dynamics between the individual elements.
In the painting process then takes place an encryption and partly again a decryption of this original idea. It is an interplay of revealing and hiding the figure. Balancing and unbalancing, tension and relaxation – negotiating these opposites by means of painting and its ciphers, as well as translating her observations of the world, people and their relationships into the swings of paint.
After the artist has successively dismantled the elements, the painting detaches itself from its template of narrative or figurative idea and continues to grow in the dynamics of its creation.
