Anders Herwald Ruhwald
None of these shapes are inevitable.
Andersens is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition by Anders Herwald Ruhwald in Copenhagen for almost a decade and his first show with gallery.
Ruhwald’s exhibition takes it form of a pared down domestic interior. The gallery is split by a halfway constructed wall that leaves part of the framing and the drywall exposed. Ruhwald has occupied the space with a group of sculptures which at first hand could be understood as domestic and perhaps even decorative.
These objects include a lamp, a set of wall platters, a planter and a floor vase. Other sculptures take on an anthropomorphic guise in the form of an ear, a mask and a series of organic forms attached to the wall intersecting the gallery. While these sculptures are easy to name, they seem slippery in their object-typologies.
The floor vase, 9 Months (Not in Labor force but Wants a Job), derives its shape from a graph by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that outlines the impact of the pandemic on the on US jobs market during the first nine months of 2020.
The two plates “Oh hello 21th Century” are hung on the wall like commemorative platters. Using a “Times New Roman” font printed “Amazon Basic” porcelain plates, they simply announce a belated deadpan greeting to the current century, the shape of which we are still trying to wrap our heads around.
Attached to the center wall are six of Ruhwald’s quasi utilitarian sculptures from the “Adaptable Bodies” series. This group of sculptures utilizes quick clamps to attach to other objects and as a result creates a semi-permanent syntactical relation with the thing it attaches to. Hereby they become part decorative accents, part relational sculptures that continually will change meaning depending on the context they are adhered to.
Further in the gallery a large bronze-like ceramic ear is attached to the gallery wall as if to suggest that the building is a body which may also be listening in on the conversation.
Ruhwald created the new works in his studio in Chicago during the final stretch US-presidential election, its aftermath and at the height of the pandemic’s second wave. The unease of this period seems to have crept into the work.
As such the show lingers along line between play and uncertainty, questioning the meaning of everyday things, how they perform and might change in the theatre daily life. The work suggests a changed balance between interior and the exterior, blurring the lines between what is considered public and private and questioning how we might understand the concept of a home and the objects that constitute it.