Therese Bülow: radio baby reverse

9 jun 202315 jul 2023

Matteo Cantarella is pleased to present Radio Baby Reverse, a solo exhibition of works by Danish artist Therese Bülow. Using the concept of worlding as an integrated understanding of her own practice, Bülow explores the conceptual and material linkages of living and constructed matter. For this exhibition, Bülow introduces an extensive installation of sculptural works that further the artist’s interest in the material and mental entanglements to our built environment.

Concerned with echoes of a forgotten past and the remnants of our biological memory, Bülow creates sculptural assemblages that forcefully defy simple categorization. Spanning wool, aluminium, soap and bronze, the artist considers our relations to materials – as to our world – as continuously changing and endlessly becoming. With this in mind, her process explores the concept of corporeality across a wide field of inquiry, contending with the crafted body to reconsider the constructs of our habitual comprehension, and to diminish the distance between humanity and its ecological surroundings.

At the center of the gallery, a large biomorphic shape – a hand felted woolen lung in a vibrant earthly tone – hangs against the angular lines and geometric shapes of a freestanding metal structure. Evocations of the natural world, drawn by the organic contours and tactile texture, delicately interconnect with the mechanical workings of the supportive apparatus, emphasizing subtle relations of tension, gravity and mass. Through a ramification of tubular conduits – reminiscent of passages of moving energy – an air compressor rhythmically inflate the membrane to a paced breathing. In Breeze (2022-2023), from whatever references the ordinariness of the materials to what traces their functional dimension, between the sculptural outline of forms and the immaterial drifts of nostalgia, no substantial disparity exists. The work’s gravity resides in the cogent relation of care and indebtedness between interdependent elements, minuscule entanglements that evolve simultaneously in an imaginative reconfiguration of the world.

In an attempt to unhinge matter from a discursive framework, the works bring forth images that eschew a univocal sense of material and semiotic belonging. Organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, human and natural simply become mutually constituting aspects of one same complex consciousness. This prompts ontological considerations of how we can perceive and engage with the world and with one another beyond one’s own skin, to understand the depth of our interconnectedness and the trajectory of our intertwined agencies. Through a combination of disparate, incongruous bodies, Bülow purposefully underlines the relevance of this sympoietic entanglement, revealing the unpredictable, imbalanced and immanent pathways through which the stances of our worldview can be reimagined.

Therese Bülow (b. 1996, Denmark) is a Danish artist, living and working between Copenhagen, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden. Bülow graduated with an MFA from Malmö Art Academy in Malmö, Sweden. Her work has been exhibited at Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art (Copenhagen, Denmark), ICA (Malmö, Sweden) and Uppsala Konstmuseum (Uppsala, Sweden), among others.