Karl Holmqvist b.1964 in Västerås Lives and works in Berlin Karl Holmqvist is a master of collage, creating a cacophonous medley of multiple and seemingly incompatible areas of life. In the powerful equalizer that is his practice, billboard hits, political slogans and minimalist design do not merely coexist but blend seamlessly. Language is used as a readymade, with each reference allowed to spin across multiple semantic registers ; a familiar slogan becomes a form of poetry and poetry a slogan. His recent performance as part of the exhibition 27 Senses ( 2009 ), Kurt Schwitters + All the Single Ladies, saw a mélange of pop song lyrics and Holmqvist’s own poems delivered in a monotonous droney voice, at times reminiscent of a religious chants. Assuming a new identity, the rhythmical chorus of Beyonce’s All the Single Ladies and Rihanna’s Under My Umbrella became a powerful poetic and melancholic dadaesque monologue. In these verbal experiments, Holmqvist works considerably with inversions – “Hitler was wrong” is followed by “wrong is right” – with language becoming a form of game where everything is fundamentally relational. Many of these semantic explorations reveal a fundamental interest in the very texture, feel and weight of a word.
The verbal play tends to take place in the settings Holmqvist has designed for them. These structures generally adhere to a minimalist aesthetic, in which they provide a classically seductive framework for the posters, writing and performance that accumulate around them. One aspect of his continuous sampling strategy has also been an increasing use of pre-established artworks as a form of Duchampian readymade to the second degree. This is a theme that unfolds on multiple levels ; also the quotes, the borrowed and found sentences that Holmqvist writes, work analogously with the structures. Both the structures and the words have been recycled to the point where notions of originality and authorship are obscured – an original of what ? This mode of production is something that Holmqvist continues in his Momentum contribution, a project in which a Mario Merz igloo is adopted as the sculptural basis for a new piece. Taking the archetypical Arte Povera structure as the point of departure, Holmqvist will transform it with found objects, handwritten text and posters. Alongside this appropriated version of a piece of canonical art history, Holmqvist will display a series of Black Paintings. The Black Paintings are a series of works consisting of black squares transferred to canvas. Within the black squares are short sentences, names or comments, creating a “negative” thought space. Similar to subtitling in films or television, the phrases printed in Karl Holmqvist’s work are there to further a narrative, but since the frame is all black, it is up to the viewer to imagine what this potential narrative would be. For Momentum, a series of black paintings are juxtaposed with the appropriated Mario Merz igloo, further adding to Holmqvist’s stream of associations. Lina Džuverovi´ c Fatima Hellberg