Matias Faldbakken
° 1973, Hobro (DK) – lives and works in Oslo (NO)
Norwegian artist and writer Matias Faldbakken’s practise centres around the collision, following a precise conceptual procedure with trivial gestures of vandalism, appropriation and poetry. Inspired by minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, with its deconstructive focus on the object and the gallery space, Faldbakken criticizes the ideology of the white cube space.
Faldbakken has an ongoing interest in transforming an existing language of forms related to a particular period in modernism and is renowned for his radical, provocative attacks on society and the art world. In thousands of ways, his work pronounces a resounding ‘no’: he destroys and provokes, but at the same time he recognises that he irrevocably belongs to the society to which he is saying ‘no’.
His practice holds in perpetual tension the forces of proposition and cancellation, vandalism and erasure, aesthetic generosity and conceptual restraint, the possibility of language and its abstraction into illegibility. In recent works, mass-produced containers are subjected to various manipulations and often rendered useless. The objects he adapts often veer between the iconic and the almost painfully generic.
Matias Faldbakken – exhibition view at Le Consortium, Dijon in 2013
Matias Faldbakken – exhibition view at Le Consortium, Dijon in 2013
Matias Faldbakken – Effects of Good Government in the Pit, exhibition view at Astrup Fearnley Museum in 2017
Matias Faldbakken – Plaster Jacket Wildly Overcommit, 2017
Matias Faldbakken – Gas Sculpture Green Red White (I.K.), 2015
Matias Faldbakken’s recent solo exhibitions include The Power Station, Dallas; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Kunsthalle St. Gallen; Wiels, Brussels; Le Consortium, Dijon; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
He participated in the biennales of Sydney, Venice, Yinchuan, and Gwangju, and in Documenta 13, Kassel. Other group shows include venues such as MOCA, Miami; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; CAC, Vilnius; PS1 MoMA, New York; SERRALVES, Porto; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Matias Faldbakken is represented by the following galleries;
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