Dag Erik Elgin
BOMBA
In November 2024, Dag Erik Elgin will present an exhibition intervention at Kunstnernes Hus. BOMBA will engage the presence of Pablo Picasso's seminal Guernica at Kunstnernes Hus in 1938, just one year after the painting was completed. At the top center of Picasso's painting depicting the terror of the aerial bombing during the Spanish Civil War, a light bulb surrounded by a lampshade emits sharp, cone-shaped rays of light. In the painting, the lamp is surrounded by twisted bodies, and it ambiguously exists both as an ordinary electric light source and as a bomb at the moment it explodes. The Spanish word BOMBA refers to this ambiguity, referring both to the bomb and to the light bulb (in Spanish, bombilla eléctrica is a diminutive of bomba).
Taking as its point of departure this pivotal moment in the exhibition history of Kunstnernes Hus, Elgin's intervention will reflect on the complex legacy of modernity and modernism, the technological and artistic innovations of these eras, and the continuation of war into the present.
When
08.11.24 – 15.12.24
Where
Skylight halls
Opening hours
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Price
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About the artist
Dag Erik Elgin’s work is informed by an ongoing investigation into the history of painting, modernist ideals and contemporary visual culture. He has established a practice where the physical qualities of painting, historical analysis and personal production are constantly negotiated. His projects engage in an explorative dialogue with the history of art practices, interpretation, provenance and reception. Recent projects introduce text-based works and repetitive strategies as catalysts for exploring modernism's ongoing affair with current cultural and aesthetic representations. A parallel production of texts accompanies the visual investigations.
Elgin has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at museums and institutions as Albertinum, Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden; The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden. His work is included in major public and private collections. In 2014 he was awarded the Carnegie Art Award first prize for his monumental work Balance of Painters, first exhibited at OSL contemporary in 2012. Elgin was a professor at the Academy of Fine Art - KHiO (2010-2016) and has contributed to numerous publications and projects addressing the position of painting within contemporary art.
