Thank you for the invitation to tell you something about my art.
I use everyday things in my art, which is based on photography. The photograph is suitable in relation to my practice, as the format can capture and document a composition for my final works. My works function as images of residences in a timeline that follows my life, you can also call it a kind of personal diary, who, actions and installations, the works represent the time when a life (my) is shaped.
My work as an artist dates back to 1995, when I had my first solo exhibition. From this a long-standing research practice, where I have worked with a number of diverse forms of expression: photography, painting, actions and installations as well as large international projects such as The Sandwich Box and The Travelers Box, the latter of which can be seen here.
In the term collected everyday things, my use of people from closer relationships is included, and most often it can also be found objects from many different places I have stayed. My works must be seen as a response to or apply change in relation to socio-cultural and societal themes.
In all my works, however, there are traces of my own personal references. The works have several layers as they encourage contemplation and open up the space to it.
In my works, flora and the insignificant mass-produced everyday things/objects can be experienced as opposites, and when combined have a thought-provoking and disturbing effect.
A dear colleague wrote for a few years ago a fairly precise text about my work, this text is still completely relevant and reads as follows:
I seem to perceive a distance, a media awareness in Lars's works. Opposites are broken: flora versus stereotypical mass-produced things and objects that Lars has created strange, versus stereotypical mass-produced flora. The seductive and beautiful immediate expressions versus the content side where things are not what we think they are.
For me, they seem disturbing, deep, but also clarifying, like when something dawns on you. It makes me think of David Lynch, because he uses objects as clichés, he 'plants' in the middle of universes that are actually everyday on the surface, but which become incomprehensible and therefore very demanding universes that complement and challenge the idea of ​​everyday life as completely ordinary.
The visual universe that characterizes Lars's works is very very beautiful and very very sensual. Completely professionally prepared. The result is very finished.
Clearly, the individual images must seduce the eyes that may fall on them. But then the trap snaps! - The delicious, with the immediately irresistibly depicted, is illuminated ‘as if’ - because the object is not delicious when you look at it more closely. The object doesn't work like the thing it once was, and it gets a new function, but there isn't really any logic anymore.
Time, all the years, everyday life, the used, are sampled in Lars's works, and stand still. Completely in line with his wishes, that his works call for reflection and that they establish spaces for this. It is common that we humans need the space of contemplation as a counterbalance to all that is hasty, fast, flux and light.
The process, the works and the world.
There is no doubt that Lars' works spring from an existential idea of ​​being. Which is also expressed in the travel theme. Immersion, time and space appear as values ​​in the life of the individual, and the quite free play with everyday objects and flora invites both the imagination, but also the mind, in a wonderful mixture, where it is clear that Lars uses art as an approach to reality. Thoughts on consumption, recycling, green world, decision-making, creativity, play and imagination. His works call for reflection, and going forward I hope that Lars will continue to keep a clear path out of the familiar and into the open, despite the external pressure from the everyday drum room.
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Lars Vilhelmsen
Danish contemporary artist, 1970
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