Based on the image, Theis Wendt builds spatial installations that point to both the space, the context and the viewer himself.
Theis Wendt's artistic background is painting and drawing, but around 2010 his work radically changed direction. Wendt's previous work on the image seemed to him hopeless in the face of the escalating and ubiquitous image bombardment with which the Internet and screen technology were increasingly confronting the world.
The content of Wendt's works at the time was therefore - according to himself - eroded by the aggressiveness of the image storm. The exhibition Gray Trampled Grass. Gray Snow from 2011 at Galleri Christoffer Egelund marked this zero point in Wendt's practice. From here, he directed his work towards the container of the image itself as an examination of its space, its context, and its contemporary situation. The image is the central focal point, but his works often end up as spacious installations.
The Swarm
In the work Swarm from 2012, the frame and the reflection as an image surface are reduced to a spatial zero point. When you walk down the stairs and through the door into the basement room, you are greeted by an overwhelming 3D mirror of the room you are standing in.
The prints are attached from floor to ceiling, and in the corner another mirror forms another room.
On the floor is a roll of mirror foil that mirrors the room and the viewer in it. With a generous investment in an elusive basement space, Wendt thus transformed the space into reflection - and the reflection into space.
The whole space became a container where image and viewer, space and virtuality exchange meanings and roles.
Wendt thus wanted to show an already thoroughly represented space. The starting point for the work was the contemporary image situation, where images act as prostheses to navigate with rather than be representations.
In Swarm, one orients oneself by virtue of the computer-generated walls and lines in the same way that the masses of the Internet act swarming in the infinite virtual space.
Mergers
The work Attachments 2012 was made during a long stay in Los Angeles in 2012. Here, a construction consisting of insulation, stones, battens, wooden boards and a flat screen divides the space and examines the relationship between place, materiality and representation.
Digital prints on wooden boards represent the installation's total sum of materials. Between the wooden plates and the representation of them, a flattening of space takes place, at the same time as a landscape is formed in between. The use of digital prints freezes perspectives and reflections in Wendt's works, so that the image surfaces represent shifts of time and space.
This method is used and further developed in his exhibition On-Tilted at the Crane Exhibition and most recently on Chart at Andersen's Contemporary - both in 2013.
The virtual worlds of the new image technologies are a central element in Wendt's works, but at the same time it is always in the realm of reality that the battles stand - it is still with our bodies that we come into contact with the works. The cool reduction seems critical to today's streams of codes, where everything heavier than after and zeros sinks to the bottom, but in the works one also understands that disillusionment and the romantic exist side by side.
Portfolio
