Mikkel Carl: Between Financial Entanglement and Corporal Decay

Dear Paul

I was wondering if I could talk you into writing a PR for my upcoming show. Or perhaps “writing,” because the preview is on Friday, so it’s super short notice. But it could be anything literally: A poem, a readymade whatever… I would much prefer this to the usual gallery blah blah.

The show consists of an 3 x 7m make-believe steel plate standing upright and cutting diagonally through the gallery space (think low budget Richard Serra) plus some mirror foil “paintings,” which look more or less like chrome.

hmm gimme more background information

The mirror works are called Untitled (You Hate the Fact that You Bought the Dream and They Sold You One). They are a “commercialized” version of an eponymous public work I recently did: I put self-adhesive mirror foil on 15 pretty banged-up poster stands in a railway station, so instead of advertisements, people would see themselves (somewhat distorted) hurrying to or from the train.

Untitled (You Hate…) are in line with my general occupation with painting: That is painting without paint and with no immediately identifiable subjective gestures or formal preoccupation with objective structures. In this case scratching the surface, and other types of “accidental” mark making are my way of composing images. Or “images” rather, because you will of course mainly see the reflection of yourself or other viewers and in particular the aforementioned wall of steel behind you.

This colossal work (I thought about calling it: Flex on You Haters) is actually composed much in the same way. It consists of masonite covered with graphite powder and lacquer, polished by hand to look like raw steel. I have also applied rust. So, this wall – forcing the viewer to take a detour to get into the adjoining room – also doubles as big ass painting(s).

The show’s title states the obvious: The pros and cons of gallery representation, and the fact that I recently turned 40, but still is very much an “emerging artist.”

ok, I’ll think about it’

Great.

Kilde: Mikkel Carl / Last Resort