Artist: Lina Viste Grønli
Exhibition title: Euro
Venue: Saloon, Brussels, Belgium
Date: December 3 – 23, 2016
Photography: Lola Pertsowsky, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Saloon
SALOON is delighted to present its inaugural exhibition ‘EURO’ by Lina Viste Grønli. The show features a new group of sculptural works that are an extension of the exhibition ‘Pentimento’, shown at Gallery Christian Andersen in 2016.
The works in ‘EURO’ are, literally, multilayered. According to the dictionary, ‘Pentimento’ is ‘a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas’. In these works Viste Grønli practices thinging – a neologism, borrowed from Heidegger, that is an inflection of the noun ‘thing’ – by entirely covering various found objects with eurocents, leaving traces and shapes of the original object visible. Lina Viste Grønli will collect daily-life objects from the city of Brussels, and present them in cheap, shiny armor. By gluing coins onto the objects, they become things enriched with added value, partly through the addition of the money itself, but even more through their new status as works of art. On the one hand they become ‘shiny objects of desire’*, which could be read as a subtle critique of the art-market with its raising prices and unpredictable rules and trends. On the other hand they might deal with the relativity of our capitalist system, since the cost of producing the coins has exceeded the nominal value of the eurocoins themselves. The obsessive covering of objects with this metal alloy transforms everyday objects into copper plated familiar shapes, serving as a kind of twisted, reversed gilded age. A hobo’s pentimento objet trouvé, if you will.
Through mediums that include sculpture, photography, collage, and writing, Lina Viste Grønli investigates the tensions between physical things and abstract systems, particularly those of linguistics and philosophy. With considerable humor, and using everyday objects and materials, she considers categories that have been historically opposed—such as the intelligible and the sensible, words and things, the systematic and the arbitrary—and interprets the excess or remainder that is uncontained by these binary structures.**
Lina Viste Grønli was born in 1976 in Bergen, Norway. She currently lives and works in Somerville, MA, USA. Her work has been seen in numerous solo and group exhibitions including Kunsthalle Wien; Kunsthall Oslo; Kunsthall Stavanger, Sculpture Center, New York; Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge; Christian Andersen, Copenhagen; Gaudel de Stampa, Paris; and Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö. Her work ‘The Peace Clock’ was recently inaugurated as a permanent sculpture across from the the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, New York.
* Mathias Kryger in Kunstkritikk
** Paragraph by Alise Upitis for MIT List Center
