10 Works to Collect at CHART
For its fourth edition, CHART—the leading fair for contemporary Nordic art—returns to the 17th-century halls of Kunsthal Charlottenborg, situated on the Nyhavn Canal in the heart of Copenhagen. Inside the ivy-clad baroque palace, a carefully curated exhibition featuring 30 art galleries and six design galleries will open later this month. We’ve perused the fair’s selection to highlight the 10 most collectible works spanning both art and design.
With this recent work by Moyer, Andersen’s Contemporary hints at their upcoming solo show with the Brooklyn-based artist, known for her paintings made from found and dyed fabrics. Patterning, along with texture and tactility, are central to Moyer’s multimedia practice, which has recently begun to incorporate stone. This elegant piece—a patchwork of stone, marble, and canvas on MDF—blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, challenging our traditional associations with certain materials. Moyer began working with marble when viewers remarked that they saw natural patterns in her “canvases.” As the artist herself puts it: “The marble came in as a concrete example of earth making these patterns.”
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979-1980, 1979-1980
Available at:
Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Booth 15
Woodman took her own life in 1981 at the young age of 22, not long after she completed her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. Today, her self-portraits and explorations of the female body are recognized as seminal works of 20th-century photography, foreshadowing the oeuvres of Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, and Nan Goldin. Here, Woodman’s use of props—a fur scarf wrapped around her otherwise naked body, a birth certificate and mirror tacked onto the wall behind her—offers a glimpse into her frequently overlooked sense of humor. Famously, when asked why so many of her photographs were self-portraits, Woodman replied, “It’s a matter of convenience—I’m always available.”
This large-scale painting by Daniel Richter—likened by some to Munch and Ensor—is a prime example of the German artist’s fluorescent-hued, psychedelic, and often violent scenes populated by burlesque dancers, superheroes, zombies, and policemen. While inspired by images drawn from contemporary magazines and newspapers, Richter also looks to art history, fixing his large-scale figurative works within the tradition of history painting. With an exhibition at L.A.’s Regen Projects just closing, his work will also be on view this fall at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark.
“Never too much” is the golden rule followed by Swiss-born designer duo Sarah Kueng and Lovis Caputo, who met as industrial design students at Zurich University of the Arts. Accordingly, their work is colorful yet minimal, lively yet understated, as in this hand-printed leather bowl, whose surface resembles a colorful marble slab or a vibrant watercolor painting. It was made with a time-honored technique used in Tuscan tanneries, in which skins are naturally dried and tanned and then stained with organic vegetable dyes.
Finnish artist Gottberg has recently began to focus on interiors, painting hyperrealistic, magnified views of furniture, fabrics, and household objects. In a series of canvases examining gleaming drinking glasses, she asks us to consider these objects just as they are: empty and divorced from our everyday use. Both translucent and reflective, glass serves as a metaphor for painting—it receives and returns the gaze.
Through his mixed-media work, Andersson proposes alternative ways of interpreting fact and fiction. “My aim is to share imprints of my thoughts that might introduce the viewer to a more multi-layered perception of the world,” he’s said. This small but mesmerizing bronze sculpture of a male hand, poised to flip a real coin in a game of “heads or tails,” freezes a moment of uncertainty and spotlights the role of chance in our daily lives. Look out for more of Andersson’s work next year in a solo show at the José de Guimarães International Arts Centre in Portugal and a public art project in Le Havre.
Tovborg’s interest in religion has led to a variety of spiritual pursuits, from editing the parish magazine of Denmark’s oldest church, to making masks with a Hindu stone carver in India, to training as an apprentice of a tea master in Japan. Likened to Kandinsky and Klee for his use of geometric symbols and hieroglyphs, the young Danish artist draws on mythology, religion, and social history to create semi-abstract, spiritually evocative paintings—like this recent acrylic and fabric collage on wood. During CHART, more of Tovborg’s work will be on view in a group exhibition at Copenhagen’s Galleri Nicolai Wallner.
In advance of forthcoming solo shows at Ratio 3 in San Francisco and Blain Southern in Berlin, Feldman’s graphic, grey-on-white paintings make a show-stopping appearance at CHART. Accented with undulating lines and expressive drips, the canvases resemble stream-of-consciousness sketches enlarged to a monumental 72-by-72-inch scale. The impression of spontaneous, off-the-cuff gesture is important for Feldman, who has compared her paintings to the punchline of a joke. “I give myself one chance to make the work,” she’s explained. “It’s related to delivering the punchline in that respect—if you don’t get it right, the audience doesn’t laugh. Either it works or it doesn’t.”
Designer and interior architect Kukkapuro is most famous for his 1964 Karuselli chair, which was influential in the field of ergonomics—the study of humans in their work environments—and continues to be produced by Artek, a Helsinki-based furniture company. Since establishing his international reputation in the 1960s, Kukkapuro has been revered for his chair designs, which embody both the functionality and comfort at the core of Finnish design. Armchair, an unadorned assemblage of black, red, yellow, and blue, captures this philosophy with its angular lines and primary colors.
This shaped painting of an iceberg—which resembles both an element from a stage set and a glimpse into a faraway land— represents Kjartansson’s ability to powerfully mingle everyday life with elements of the sublime. Titled Seul celui qui connait le désir, the piece comes from a series included in Kjartansson’s 2015 solo show of the same name at Palais de Tokyo, where a cluster of the craggy paintings stood upright on the floor of a large room like a mountainous obstacle course-cum-carnival game. The Reykjavik-based artist’s work is also on currently on view in a major survey at London’s Barbican Art Gallery.
—Demie Kim
