Sculpture Supermarket

August 26, 2019

Working at the intersection of art and design, Copenhagen-based artists Frederik Nystrup-Larsen and Oliver Sundqvist move across the boundaries between media with ease. Whether working with sculpture, furniture or site-specific installations, Nystrup-Larsen and Sundqvist share a proclivity for the unconventional, constantly questioning the notions of contemporary art.

Their new exhibition ‘Off License — Cash Only’ is a pop-up storefront that displays and sells sculptures made from upcycled trash that are named after real-life objects—from a dustpan to a replica African elephant skull. Inspired by Claes Oldenburgs ’The Store’ in New York and the off-license liquor stores of London—where the two Danes have been living for the past six months—the exhibition reinterprets the process of buying art while serving as a harsh critique of overconsumption and bad manufacturing.

Interview by Benjamin Dane
Photos by Simon Heger Knudsen

Basically, Frederik Nystrup-Larsen and Oliver Sundqvist want you to stop buying shit and throw it away. So now, they’re selling it back to you as a work of art. Check out our interview with the duo below.

Tell me about ‘Off License – Cash Only’.

Oliver Sundqvist - 'Off License – Cash Only’ is a pop-up storefront that sells sculptures named after real life objects. The first edition will open in Copenhagen. It’s a happening that merges the concepts of art exhibition and commercial event.

Frederik Nystrup-Larsen - The exhibition is a critique of the overconsumption of our society, but also questions the process of art valuation and channels our irrational fear of online shopping, all with a slight twist of dark humor. I don’t think we’ve ever done something that has so many layers to it.

Why make it a storefront?

OS - In London, where we’ve both been living for the last six months, off-license is a term for shops that are allowed to sell alcohol off the premises. They’re basically liquor stores, but you can buy almost anything. In one place we went to, they had New Year’s decorations for sale in the summer. There was something really fascinating about these shops and all the weird stuff they were selling. At the same time, we’ve been having a lot of discussions about the way art is valued and sold compared to other commodities. Somewhere along the road, we stumbled upon Claes Oldenburgs ‘The Store’, a happening circumventing the traditional art gallery by selling sculptures through a storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1961, and we decided to use his work as a reference for our store in Copenhagen. We’ve rented a retail space just off the central main street, and we’re hiring sales assistants to serve the customers.

So, you’re essentially turning the process of buying art into a shopping experience—like getting yourself a new pair of shoes.

FNL - You could say that, yes. And simultaneously, we’re transforming the shopping experience into an art exhibition. We call it a sculpture supermarket.

You say the exhibition is a critique of overconsumption. How so?

FNL - Personally, I become so annoyed, almost angry, when I see the kind of shitty things people mindlessly buy for themselves. That goes for food, fashion, furniture and so many other things that we consume on a regular basis. We’ve been quite concerned about sustainability for a while and that shows in all our work. For instance, all the materials of the sculptures for ‘Off License – Cash Only’ are made out of trash. It’s basically polished pieces of garbage made from of all the things people throw out that we’re now selling back to them.

That’s a bit ironic.

FNL - I guess it is. But we hope that it will encourage people to question their habits as consumers.

The project is inspired by Claes Oldenburg. But he made objects that actually looked like the things they represented. Yours don’t. Why?

OS - You know that feeling of buying something off a slightly sketchy online store, and when you open the package, what you see is completely different from the product images? That’s what we’re aiming for here. What we did was to take photos of the sculptures and send them to India where a company retouched them for us, making them look all shiny and perfect. Then we posted them on Instagram without stating the size of any of them. When people enter the store, they’ll find out that both the size and the finish of the sculptures look completely different from the images on Instagram.

FNL - We also bought a bunch of fake followers. I tried to buy 100.000 but got tricked and ended up getting just 20.000, but that’s actually a perfect number. If we had too many followers, people would obviously know that it’s fake but now, they aren’t sure whether it’s real or not. We’re poking at people’s critical sense by serving them something that’s not completely transparent.

Do you think people will get what you’re trying to communicate here?

OS - Hopefully, the Instagram-profile will make them so intrigued that they’ll show up to the opening just to see what the fuck is going on. And when they enter the store, I think the coin will drop. We’re really excited to see how people will react to this method of displaying and selling art. In that sense, the exhibition is an experiment for us as well.

Usually, the price tag of an emerging artist is supposed to go up from exhibition to exhibition. Here, you can buy an original work of art by Frederik-Nystrup Larsen and Oliver Sundqvist for less than two dollars. Is that wise?

OS - We had a lot of discussions with our gallerist about this and from a financial point of view, this exhibition probably makes no sense. But we’re so tired of the traditionalist ways of the art world and at the same time, we want our work to be democratic and accessible, though we might not be able to keep it that way because of how the art market works. The price range goes from a 1.5-dollar avocado to a sculpture titled ‘Convertible Soft-Top Sports Car (2013, 418.429 km)’ at $10.000.

You mentioned that this is just the first edition. Where will the store go next?

FNL - We don’t know yet. Maybe New York, maybe New Delhi. But we’re excited to see how the exhibition will be received and evolve from city to city.

‘Off License – Cash Only’ will open on August 28th in Copenhagen.

Art

Luna Luna: Surrealist Spectacle Lands in New York

November 21, 2024

In the 1980s, André Heller, an Austrian artist, singer-songwriter, and former actor, was looking for a new place to showcase his art. He had already taken to gardens, creating a colorful, surrealistic character using 40,000 flowers, and to the skies, organizing a 'fire theatre,' which involved an over-the-top fireworks show complete with steel-frame sculptures set on fire. But he had never tried out a fair.

So began "Luna Luna." Created as the world's first art carnival, "Luna Luna" combined the spectacular with the absurd, showcasing original rides and attractions from rising and already-at-the-top artists in Hamburg. Nearly forty years since its debut, followed by foiled plans for a worldwide tour, breached contracts, and 44 storage boxes, the art fair has finally returned, calling New York home after re-debuting last year in Los Angeles.

By Hailey Johnson
Photography by Delvin Claro and Sabrina Sarnitz, courtesy of Luna Luna LLC

On a recent evening in Hudson Yards, a small carousel featured characters in quirky, Twister-like poses and an outstretched dog with seven legs. (Almost a century old, the rides are no longer rideable.) Goofy wooden sculptures were elevated in another corner, some of them cross-eyed or with a horn for a nose. A geodesic dome glowed, with Gregorian chants hovering somewhere above it.

"It's an art experience like no other," Michael Goldberg, Chief Experience Officer of Luna Luna, said recently. "People get to see artists do things they've never done before," he added.

Goldberg, founder of Something Special Studios, a creative agency behind many Nike campaigns, was determined to resurrect “Luna Luna” after reading about it online in 2019. Goldberg shopped for investors, eventually teaming up with DreamCrew, a media company co-owned by the rapper Drake. (Details on the company's investment remain vague; sources have reported that DreamCrew spent over "100 million dollars.") In 2022, an intensive restoration process began, with a team of artists reviving many of the original works, which had remained in boxes in a Texas warehouse for over thirty years. Several had been in pieces. (The team reportedly had to rebuild each work "bolt by bolt.")

That night, at the Shed, fourteen out of the original thirty-five works were on display, including the small carousel (Keith Haring), the goofy sculptures (Kenny Scharf), the neon dome (Salvador Dali), and a towering Ferris wheel decorated in drawings of stick figures, upside crowns, and references to Jim Crow (Basquiat). Missing works are in a "constant state of restoration," Goldberg said. Meanwhile, new attractions are joining the line-up. For the New York show, the Puerto Rican duo Poncilí Creación was commissioned to create "PonciliLand," a blink-and-you-miss-it section where guests "can create fantastical characters out of custom building blocks." Poncili also developed floating characters, inspired by performers who circulated the original “Luna Luna” fairgrounds in 1987. Known as "Lovers," the two characters, large and dreamlike, teetered to one side, mumbling the kind of nervous groans one does before a fall. (They never ended up falling.)

I asked Goldberg if, given that today's culture doesn't quite look or feel the same way as it did in 1987, there was any hesitation in showing some of the original works. On a back wall, a tribute featured Manfred Diex's "Palace of the Wind," a show featuring performers who fart into a microphone; on another, two ornate pedestals held sculptures of spiral poop.

"I don't see any reason why we wouldn't show any of these works," he said. "A lot of the time, art is exclusive and uninviting. The big difference between “Luna Luna” and other art experiences is that it has many sides to it, and things that have a bit of humor and playful energy. "As for "Palace of the Winds,” the decision to keep it was simple: farting is universal. He went on: "The “Crap Chancellery" is, conceptually, one of the most important works in “Luna Luna.” Daniel Spoerri's dad was killed in the Holocaust, and the work was inspired by Albert Speer, who was Hitler's architect. He took the facade of what was meant to be a Nazi shrine and turned it into the facade of a bathroom with two steaming statues of shit standing on the outside. These works are extremely important and are things that we would definitely want to honor and draw attention to."

As “Luna Luna” further develops, the show will likely change. "It will continue to evolve as we go to different cities in response to the spaces that we pop up into and in collaboration with the local city," Goldberg said." With it, there will be new rides, new characters, and new stories to tell. One aspect that won't change, though, as Goldberg assured, is a long-held sentiment about a potential partnership. At one point, early on during the original “Luna Luna” era, McDonald's wanted to buy into it. Heller said no, adding that he "didn't want it to feel like Disneyland." Goldberg agreed. Nonetheless, as I watched Kenny Scharf's dizzying swing ride go around for what felt like the hundredth time, with the cartoon characters decorated on it blurring together (one with a villain's grin, another morphed into a martini glass), I couldn't help but feel like maybe I was at Disneyland, only not as robbed, but just as entertained and exhausted by its rides and fantastical characters, and wanting to go again.

Luna Luna, Hamburg, Germany, 1987.

Art

Pamela Sneed’s Speaking Tongue opens at Dashwood Projects

November 15, 2024

Pamela Sneed’s latest exhibition, Speaking Tongue, will be on view at Dashwood Projects from November 20 to December 21. The show features twenty watercolor and ink paintings inspired by her recent trip to Kenya, where she was deeply moved by the elegance of giraffes, the landscapes, and the energy of Nairobi.

Blending her background as a poet and visual artist, Sneed’s work reflects on themes of identity, nature, and connection. Her paintings capture the beauty and spirit of the animals she encountered, alongside reflections on her own experiences as part of the African diaspora.

This exhibition marks Sneed’s first solo show with Dashwood Projects and will be accompanied by a new book, also titled Speaking Tongue, to be released in December.

By Enzo Holdt
Artworks by Pamela Sneed

Art

Tiebreaker - Alvin Armstrong

November 15, 2024

There is a moment of silence right before the play. Just before the racket strikes the ball as it hangs weightless in the air, breathless and charged. It’s the fleeting yet decisive instant that can alter the course of the match, determining who wins and who loses.

Alvin Armstrong depicts this crucial moment in his new exhibition Tiebreaker, symbolizing the risks and rewards of competition. It’s an implication of something else at stake, where athletes push not only their bodies, but their spirits to the absolute limit.

The dynamic figures embody the strength, grace, and agility juxtaposed by the vibrant color palette evoking not just the joy of competition but the charged energy of the court.

Tiebreaker is opening Thursday, November 16th at Anna Zorina Gallery.