Christian Andersson: From Lucy with love

Moderna Museet Malmö starts the year with an exhibition of the Malmö-based artist Christian Andersson. His largest solo show so far—From Lucy with love—will fill the entire Turbine Hall with several new works, presenting visitors with one of the most complex oeuvres in Swedish contemporary art.

Christian Andersson was born in Stockholm in 1973 and now lives and works in Malmö. He graduated from the Malmö Art Academy in 2001 and has exhibited profusely in Europe and the USA. From Lucy with love at Moderna Museet Malmö is his largest solo exhibition to date.

Christian Andersson offers an alternative interpretation of truth in his oeuvre. He wants to show the onlooker that there are more perspectives than one on reality and our history. Andersson brings out the forgotten or repressed facts and presents them in his own way, challenging our routine thought patterns.

From Lucy with love invites visitors to a limbo between modern utopia and a surrealist dream in the form of a monumental sculpture. In the middle of the exhibition space is a sort of incomplete timeline, a contemporary cabinet of curiosities, where the artist destabilises the museum's power and role as upholder of the truth. Christian Andersson triggers fleeting doubts in order to put our powers of perception to the test, juxtaposing sense and sensibility.

Christian Andersson presents a panoply of references. Distinct art historic references to Magritte and surrealism in the exhibition's largest work are interspersed with more implicit allusions to conspiracy theories and literature. The clearest link is perhaps the one to the architect Mies van der Rohe and his Barcelona pavilion, which was demolished in 1930 and reconstructed in 1980 on the exact same site in Barcelona. Christian Andersson, in turn, has constructed an abstract replica of a part of the pavilion for his exhibition at Moderna Museet Malmö. History, the modernist utopian dream, is consciously repeated a third time.

A richly illustrated catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition at Moderna Museet Malmö, featuring an essay by freelance curator/critic Chris Sharp, a new poem by the author Aris Fioretos and an e-mail conversation between the artist and the assistant curator Andreas Nilsson.

The exhibition is sponsored by Vinge.

Christian Andersson
From Lucy with love
Kuratoren: Magnus Jensner, Andreas Nilsson