YOUNG DUMB & BROKE
#5 ANDREAS ERIKSSON

Opening: 4 April, 5–7pm
Exhibition: 5 April – 16 June 2024

YOUNG DUMB & BROKE is a series of mini exhibitions at UKS each displaying a single, early work by a previously unknown, but now older and esteemed artist. The series explores the quest between young artists’ experiments and the hindsight of recognition and leveraging of experience, borrowing its title from a billboard hit from the 2017 American Teen album by singer-songwriter Khalid.

For the fifth edition of this exhibition series, UKS presents ANDREAS ERIKSSON (b. 1975), a Swedish artist who has achieved wide international recognition with institutional exhibitions and biennials.

Using various media, ranging from painting and textile work to sculpture and installation, Eriksson explores his immediate surroundings in Lidköping, at the southern end of Lake Vänern. Eriksson is known for his delicate paintings that abstract motifs from forest floor, bog and soil through formal and conceptual processes.

As an art student, Eriksson was heavily preoccupied with 1970s paintings in general, and Willem de Kooning in particular, but his admiration for the great artists of the 70s became paralysing. In 1996, while facing a canvas covered in thick, wet oil paint that he considered a failure, Eriksson found inspiration via a painting he had seen in New York the previous year: Willem de Kooning’s …Whose Name Was Writ in Water (1975). The lyrical title of the painting is a reference to the epigraph on the tombstone of the poet John Keats (1795 – 1821) – ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’ – where the motif conveys the flowing movements of water. Eriksson thought he glimpsed the name ‘Bill’, short for Willem, in skewed and warped letters in de Kooning’s abstract painting.

Facing his own failed painting in Stockholm, Eriksson added his first name using bold brushstrokes in the wet, pasty paint. ‘An-dre-as’ is imprinted into the cloudy blue-green surface, like the shades of an algae-infested lake. In this way, Vars namn är skrivet i färg captures historical references and whimsical tributes between artists, across disciplines, centuries and stages of their careers.

Text by Ida Møller Engebretsen, who has curated Young Dumb & Broke #5 Andreas Eriksson.

UKS’ mini presentation will be on simultanously as Andreas Eriksson’s large-scale solo exhibition Huset luter, men gardinene henger rett at Lillehammer Kunstmuseum, opening on 13 April 2024.

YOUNG DUMB & BROKE

#5 Andreas Eriksson (2024)

#4 Brit Fuglevaag (2021)

#3 Elsebet Rahlff (2020/2021)

#2 Bjarne Melgaard (2019/2020)

#1 Matt Mullican (2019)