ART-PRESENTATION: Ulf Rollof-Urgent, Part I
In the work of Ulf Rollof opposites confront each another. Natural scenery confronts culture, reflexion intuition. Nothing is self-explanatory. The vulnerability of life is an important theme. One of the strengths in hiswork is the way it transforms what is personally experienced into something universal. When pain strikes us our astonished bodies struggle to defend themselves from it. Who is a stranger to this instinct?
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
Ulf Rollof was born in Karlskrona, Sweden and received his degree from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm. In the late ‘70s, Rollof studied under the artist and social activist Michael Schnorr in San Diego, USA. The exhibition “Urgent” at Moderna Museet in Malmö addresses the major issues of our day, and summarizes 40 years of Ulf Rollof’s artistic career in an existential and physical experience. Since the 1980s, Ulf Rollof (b. 1961) has worked with a multitude of different materials and expressions—sculpture, works on paper, moving images, experimental painting, mechanical installations, and photography. The exhibition features 20 works, ranging from his early watercolors to photographs, from large installations to his shooting paintings and the latest large lightbox paintings. Moderna Museet has a comprehensive collection of Rollof’s work, and the exhibition complements these with a number of important pieces on loan from Private collections and from the artist himself. Ulf Rollof creates his art in dialogue with what he is experiencing here and now. But although the point of departure is always the artist’s own experiences, the resulting works are never private, they touch on the universally human with great force. Rollof’s work deals in various ways with boundaries (boundaries between the organic and the artificial, between the rational and the occult, as well as physical national boundaries). Other recurring themes include time and movement, and the relation between two opposites, such as hot and cold, life and death, man and animal.
Info: Curator: Iris Müller-Westermann, Moderna Museet Malmö, Ola Billgrens plats 2–4, Malmö, Duration: 22/6/17-14/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se
