Sif Hedegård: Shine

24 mar 202312 maj 2023

Matteo Cantarella is pleased to present Shine, Sif Hedegård’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Known for her performative actions using her body to unmask themes of fragility and trauma, Shine marks the debut of a series of intimately scaled works on paper, which draw on an experiential vocabulary of bodily and spiritually intertwined imagery.

Rendered in pastel and graphite, the works depict feeble outlines of figures, emanating from diffuse bands of color. In some instances, the silhouettes protrude from objects, in others, they radiate from their own erasing, seemingly overcoming their physicality. Colour is used sparingly, less to accentuate the forms than to create an impression of movement. The works are further abstracted by layers of parchment paper and plastic sheeting, a sub-sequential gesture that imbues the figures with a spectral otherworldliness.

In this series of drawings, Hedegård visualizes disassociation, a feeling that the artist relates to a bodily experience before being an emotional one. Shine connotes a reveal, bringing something or someone to light, but it also implies exposing, to lay open in a vulnerable way. Not unlike imagining a spirit transcending its body, the works linger in a spatial purgatory where the self is revealed split, multitudinous and transforming. Continually in flux, each image seems to be traversing the internal and immaterial terrains where the known and the unknown collide – and yet feel oddly familiar to us.

Shifting the viewpoint from the core to the peripheral, the works abruptly burst into a sinuous assemble of sculptural structures. As with most of Hedegård’s practice, these compositions began with a process of undoing, a practice that artist finds deeply generative. Hedegård used a papier-mâché process, combining strips of paper and other castoff materials to develop forms through repeated overlaying. Emerging from layers of application, erasure and manipulation, these solid constructions stand as an expansion of the body, supportive appendages that complicate our corporeal consciousness.

Embracing performance, sculpture, installation, and drawing, Hedegård grounds her transdisciplinary practice in a rigorous dissection of the social and aesthetic dimensions of the human body, often by pushing the physical limits of her own.

Pressemeddelelse: Matteo Cantarella