Magnus Andersen at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden

Artist: Magnus Andersen

Exhibition title: L’éducation régionale

Venue: Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany

Date: September 2 – October 15, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, and Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt am Main

Adolescents, who, in a social game, play the roles of adults and thus assume responsibility in state organizations, are central to Magnus Andersen’s first institutional exhibition L‘éducation régionale. The project, which consists of paintings and sound installations, highlights the importance of education. The Intereuropean conglomerate of Greek mythology, English rococo, Soviet propaganda and the regional education, mentioned in the title, which is for example in France increasingly subordinated to national interests, raises questions: Should future generations orient themselves towards
or neglect tradition? What values, what political and social principles, what symbols of power are conveyed to them?

Menacingly staged industrial impersonality meets melancholic rural romance. A family scene that seems harmless at first glance turns out to be an act of violence in the midst of a cosmically haunted scene, traditional art historical motifs are reinterpreted and combined with contemporary fashion. Magnus Andersen’s figurative paintings move in a tension field of opposites, which also continues in his painting style: complementary contrasts intensify the paintings and the alternation between glazed and impasto color accents certain elements of the paintings.

In his motif selection, Magnus Andersen refers to works of art by the British Rococo at the end of the 18th century. In this epoch, the concept of „sensibility“, from today‘s point of view, emerged for the first time with modern views of the human-being and society, such as a redefinition of childhood, in which children are not only regarded as „mini adults“ but as beings with their own age-appropriate needs.

In Magnus Andersen’s installation the discussion about education that encompasses all aspects of life expands over the space of the canvas. A conspicuous feature of his image composition is the unity between paintings and frames. The frames, which are made of aluminum and bear text elements, refer in form and content to the depicted in the painting. They are an essential part of the paintings and lead the image content beyond the boundaries of the canvas. This spatial intention is underlined by an omnipresent sound installation. In the style of team-building chants in different European languages, which evoke associations from summer camps to hooliganism and chorales, some highlights of Post-1945 Europe are chanted in a mix of quotations, extracts from trade agreements and statements about popular holiday destinations. As in his earlier works, Andersen thus isolated symbols and anecdotes of European history for L‘éducation régionale which, as pseudo-educational means, establish a moral set of rules.

Magnus Andersen (born 1987 in Elsinore, Denmark) studied in the class of Martin Erik Andersen at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and until 2016 at the Städelschule Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt in the class of Judith Hopf. His works have already been shown in Vienna, Copenhagen, Frankfurt am Main and most recently in New York.

Magnus Andersen, Tabula Rasa, 2017, Oil and acrylic on canvas, alu-core frame