Frederik Nystrup-Larsen & Oliver Sundqvist: Soft Boxing

19 jan 201916 feb 2019

Soft Boxing is Danish artist duo Frederik Nystrup-Larsen & Oliver Sundqvist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, for which they have developed a series of 9 sculptures of iron, coated acrylic knit and fluorescent LED pipes. The works offer a new reading, bending and breaking of the definition of sculpture as form, spatial relations, volume, line, color, texture. Soft Boxing is motionarrested in time.

The title refers to Tai Chi, the immemorial Chinese martial art consisting of gentle and forceful continuous movements with combination of mind, strength and proper breathing. Soft Boxing is a meticulously phenomenological exploration of this gradual transition of flowing movements, one after another. Breath in, breath out. Zen. Channeling energy from mind, through the body and its gestures, onto the material, Soft Boxing is rendered as a sculptural legacy of Tai Chi’s aesthetic movements.

Connoting Tai Chi’s poetic charm and fundamental Yin/Yang-duality, each sculpture consists of a skeleton of bended steel strings, determining the object’s biomorphic form – reviving the 1950s idiom of organic design – stretched by a seamless coated acrylic-knitted tube, swung in a direction, a gesture, a command. Soft Boxingis 9 unique variations of this ritual. 9 displacements of form within the transference. We are confronted with these anthropomorphic shapes, quite physically, before they catch our eyes as 9 shadows of the previous and the following luminescent creatures, some dangle from the ceiling, other balance or sit on fragile legs, resembling a butterfly chrysalis or a praying mantis.

Light – immaterial and weightless – have the potential to carry evocative power. Characterized by its weightless luminosity, the sculptures provide a softened, indirect light for a more ambient experience. The delicate, fibrous sleeves disguise the shaped fluorescent LED pipes, while softening their harsh glow, transforming the electric light back to the light of our origin – the natural light from the sun and moon – and this is the light that will continue to fill our rooms.

Kilde: Eighteen