Hanna Hansdotter (b. 1984) has established herself as a distinctive artist who combines formal language and conceptuality from design, handicrafts and contemporary art. She studied glassblowing at Kosta Glasscenter and Glasskolan in Orrefors before studying art at Konstfack in Stockholm, and combines the craft experience and insight with conceptual and form-related issues. She has had several significant exhibitions in recent years, including at venues such as the Kalmar Konstmuseum and Waldemars Udde in her native Sweden, but also in Los Angeles and New York. Her works have been purchased by, among others, the National Museum in Stockholm, the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, The Ringing Museum of Art in Miami, and the Statens Konstråd. She has also won several awards.
For the exhibition at QB Gallery, she has worked on new works which are also a move on from the projects she has worked on previously. The starting point is antiquity as an aesthetic concept as expressed in torsos and columns. In a series of works, Hansdotter has cast masculine, muscular torsos in glass and embossed them with tattoos. In another series, she has cast pillars that have broken open or fallen over. She also shows a series of vases covered in bubbles and a new series of wall works where these bubbles are continued. Although the forms are developed and continued, the core is the same and she takes her starting point in the body as a form and as a sensory apparatus; the body of the works meets the audience’s body in a direct sensory relationship. Put another way: More than looking at her works, the public experiences them as spatial and sensual bodies.
Her art both contradicts and makes fun of Adolf Loo’s pompous and colonial essay “Ornament and Crime” (1908), which was perceived as a manifesto for the aesthetics of modernism. Loo’s idea was that the aesthetics should be frugal and disciplined, without ornaments or other formal means that could be perceived as useless. Loo’s essay laid the premises for the Bauhaus, the geometric and reductive idiom of the applied art movement and minimalism and in many ways mirrors Michel Foucault’s perspective on modernity as defined by disciplining the body; madness, crime and sexuality were to be suppressed in order to maintain civilization. In the modern aesthetic, all signs of irrationality and lack of control were to be weeded out.
For Loos, the tattoo is the ultimate sign of barbaric decadence and an uncivilized idiom, and in that sense it is possible to see a direct link between Loos’s fear of the ornament and Hansdotter’s play with the tattoo in his works. The torsos she has molded are tight and muscular and perhaps more idealistic than realistic (for most men), while tattoos that say “Easy Tiger” or “Love Hurts” become a redemptive humorous gesture, highlighting a banality in the modern (Western) society’s pursuit of disciplined and perfected bodies.
It is natural to think of archeology and the decline of civilizations in the face of ancient pillars lying around or broken up. Again, the tight, symmetrical shape is put into play. In light of recent years’ monument debates and criticism of Western hegemony, it is tempting to read the toppled pillars as a metaphor that the ancient philosophy that has defined so much of Western thinking and social life is under attack. For Friedrich Nietzsche, Western society is characterized by the fact that rational thinking – the logical thinking introduced by Socrates in Greek philosophy – had pushed out the spiritual and the irrational. With modernity, emotions, the irrational, the spiritual were finally completely suppressed, he believed. (That’s what he put in the statement “God is dead”)
Many artists have since used art and the art space to explore precisely the irrational and the corporeal, and it is possible to understand Hansdotter’s artistic project in the light of these fundamental issues related to Western civilization, discipline and the body. She uses a playful idiom and humor as part of the means to explore these questions and opens up a post-colonial and feminist critique of colonialist and masculine structures.
– André Gali
