Linnéa Gad: Soliloquy
May 6 - July 2, 2017
Opening reception: Saturday, May 6, 2017, 3 – 8 PM
Artist’s reading: Saturday, May 13, 4PM
“The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as it a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.” - Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
6BASE is pleased to present Linnéa Gad: Soliloquy, a solo exhibition on view May 6 through July 2, 2017. This is the fourth exhibition in the space and will include new works made on site by Swedish artist Linnéa Gad.
For Gad, a soliloquy is an inner dialogue exposed and her presentation at 6BASE is a poetic experiment resulting from an intuitive practice. In her paintings, prints, and installations, she transforms static images of organic matter, domestic spaces, aerial landscapes, and seascapes into abstract, multisensory forms. She sources imagery from books she has read, visual archives she has found, and ideas developed through her own writing to create compositions that are beyond the original image’s subjective forms and convey both historical context and personal narratives. Often pairing elements found in nature with mass-produced industrial materials, such as moss and sponges, pine clippings and foam, Gad is “interested in the complexity of recognizing beauty in images and materials that relate to the construction and destruction of our society.”1 She describes, “My work relies on the principles of poetry to convey beauty and form, which is untranslatable. That is the inexplicit conversation between the process and the piece and the piece and the viewer 2…In my installations, I compare comical and confusing repetitions. I fantasize of an aesthetic common ground between the ‘natural’ and the ‘manmade.’” Through the process of her art making, Gad is able to work through her own internal feelings and thoughts to address wider, universal concepts.
Included in the exhibition are two large-scale paintings on panel of waves based on images found in a nautical chart. Gad enlarges the original images and saturates the wood with diluted paint that seeps into the grain to become one with the panel. She then primes the surface with clear gesso and sands it, creating a hazy white fog-like layer over the paint and wood grain. Through this process, Gad’s compositions become more abstract, as though it were a negative film of a wave, while also lively with movement. The artist has created three small-scale works on paper depicting the interior parts of food items, such as the root vegetable, malanga (also known as taro) and melon. Heavily primed in gesso to the extent that the paper is unrecognizable and magnetically attached to the wall, these works reveal a similar pattern to the water, thus underlying the sense of ambiguity in the artist’s mysterious yet suggestive works. Sea foam green insulation boards that have been layered with gesso and stacked are displayed on the floor. Placed on top of the stacks are found objects from nature, including rocks and fragments of seashells from Long Island Sound. The artist has also made works on interior lining material with the words “I feel you, I eat you, I smell you” transferred onto the poly-weaved fabric. Across the various media and subject matter of the works presented in Soliloquy, Gad exposes the internal makeup of the forms to express infinite metaphors with exquisite beauty.
Linnéa Gad was born in Stockholm, Sweden where she currently lives and works. She received her B.F.A. from Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York. Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition Currently Remodelling at SBG31 in Stockholm (2016) and [interlude] at the Swedish Church Gallery, New York (2013). Gad has participated in a number of international group exhibitions including Melted City 4 and 2, Blanc Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines (2017 and 2015); Dioramas, Auto Body, New York (2016); Traces, Gowanus Loft, Brooklyn; Call For Extras, Gauthier Gallery, Brooklyn; Drawn Out, Studio 66, Brooklyn; Shrink it Pink it!, Cathouse FUNeral, Brooklyn (all 2014); Down Below the Feet, Park Life, San Francisco; An Evening at Home in a private home in New York (both 2013); among others. In 2018, RØM Gallery in Copenhagen will host a solo exhibition of the Gad’s work. The artist has been the recipient of residencies’ and programs including the Immigrant Artist Program, New York Foundation for the Arts; Tomato House Artist in Residence; and Neo New York, The Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art, New York (all 2014). Gad was a JP Morgan Chase Scholar from 2009 through 2013.
1 Artist statement, 2016.
2 Linnéa Gad, quoted in Maria Anderson, “The Fauna Mark-Making: An Interview with Linnéa Gad.” paperdarts.org (August 15, 2014).
