Julie Sass
VOLUME RHYTHM MATTER dialogues
May 5–June 24, 2017
Introduction: May 5, 4pm
Dialogue/artist talk: May 23 & May 25 (by request)
The Danish National Art Library
Nyhavn 2
1007 Copenhagen K
Brown on light yellow, magenta on light blue and turquoise on white are all facing the viewer as we enter The Danish National Art Library in central Copenhagen. We are faced with images before words. Visual artist Julie Sass has created a solo show at The Danish National Art Library to accompany her new artist book on abstraction. Continuing in the hallways, words emerge as a flow of an ongoing conversation that can be picked up, and sometimes substituted with yet more images. Further into the library reading corridors, larger scaler lithographs; developed images from the book, are printed on deep violet paper with varying metallic touches of blue mixed with almost black scribbles in smoked dark walnut frames, hung on bright orange library walls among books and more books. At the spiral staircase in the main reading room there is a big poster performative collage: the book is presented by performers holding heliographic prints, as a display within a display, adding new perspectives to a further dialogue.
All this is dealing with abstraction; with daily concerns in our time, philosophical questions, and how that evolves in our minds, and our shared visual language.
From the book’s Preface:
“This book emerges from a desire to explore ideas about abstraction in a set of dialogues with the artists Arturo Herrera, Erin Lawlor, Ann Pibal, and Steel Stillman, all of whose work I admire. The four of them engage abstraction in ways that are very different from one another and quite unlike my own. At the start, I asked each to pose questions about abstraction that, while addressed specifically to my work, related to their own concerns. Each dialogue developed differently. And part of my response was visual, taking the form of heliographic prints, and lithographic cover made in collaboration with Jan Andersson at Steinprent. The prints mirror a rhythm, a sigh, or something touched on in the conversations. Most repeat something from memory, translating ideas into scribbles, visual monuments that invite new thoughts to gather around. My aim is that these dialogues will continue in future conversations, exhibitions and books.”
–Julie Sass 2016
“Again, that was very much something that struck me… ‘the question of the viewer in Radical Painting.’ It is a text that I also appreciate, again, for its openness—proposing questions rather than answers… Your work, approaching as it does context with such consideration of the viewer, seems to me to provide one possible actualization of that, or answer.”
–Erin Lawlor (visual artist, UK)
“… I aim to have the painting (abstraction) dialogue in several circumstances as a way to opening up the various contexts where it can present the viewer to Matter… and offer that pause or push that the material/subject can hold ..in present and future situations…”
–Julie Sass (excerpt from the book)
May 5, 4pm
Introduction by Julie Sass, dialogue by Erin Lawlor (visual artist, UK) and Julie Sass, followed by reception in The Danish National Art Library
May 23 and May 25
Dialogue/artist talk regarding the book with visual artist Julie Sass is available upon request.
Booking: Diana Kirkeskov, diki [at] kb.dk
VOLUME RHYTHM MATTER dialogues is made in collaboration with Steinprent, Faroe Islands.
Edition of 200 signed copies. 60 pages. 18 heliographic prints, lithographic cover.
2016/ 2017, copyright JS and the artists: Arturo Herrera, Erin Lawlor, Ann Pibal, Steel Stillman
Notes on JS at Steinprent and VOLUME RHYTHM MATTER dialogues, text by Kinna Poulsen.
*Image above: Julie Sass, Performative collage- VOLUME RHYTHM MATTER dialogues, 2017. Performers: Tomas Lagermand Lundme, Jóhan Martin Christiansen, Marianne Grønnow, Astrid Svangren, Alexander Behrang Keshtkar, Marco Garcia Ecks, Erin Lawlor. Photo: Torben Eskerod. Design, poster: Jeanne Betak.
