Ulrik Weck
I’d Rather be a Joke Than a Tragedy

15 January – 20 February 2010

Galleri Christina Wilson is proud to present the gallery's first major exhibition by Ulrik Weck. Weck works conceptually with sculpture, photography, painting, texts and installation. Weck has for a long time worked with linguistic displacements and ambiguous messages, with an eye for random misreadings, sayings and unclear spacing, through which both serious and satirical aspects arise.

"Untitled (for Raymond Carver)" mimics a whole wall of books. As is often the case with books on shelves, we tend to look at them rather more than we read them. And their presence in a as objects in a room is just as important to its atmosphere as sofas, rugs and, yes, art. The book spines promise a content of knowledge and stories, and although one should not judge a book by its cover, it is here on the cover that Weck's 'books' reveal their content: colour co-ordinated laminate patterns and chipboard textures from the kitchen furniture, chests of drawers, beds and cabinets that have been replaced over the past few years with the help of interest-free loans, and are now recirculated here as new works of art with shelf yards of concrete testimony to the housing bubble and the accompanying heady boom that made everyone go a little mad. Weck's upcycling of these materials presents a humorous reflection on the phenomenon, and ensures that art does not merely contribute to more of the same.

"Territorial Totem 1 – 4" consists of stacked columns of semi-shattered, painted porous concrete blocks. The fragments were found in abandoned districts of condemned buildings. The first movers in such areas are often pushers, ravers and graffiti artists. They mark out their territories with tags, pieces and throw-ups, and send out scouts to watch for customers and uninvited guests, while the buildings themselves fall apart. Places like this are where Weck finds the foundation stones for his urban totem sculptures. In a kind of contemporary archaeology, he collects the broken bricks with their traces of graffiti and tags. With the help of just a few incisions and workings, he then stacks these basic materials from the urban 'jungle' and identifies a kinship between the art and the urban first movers – a kinship that is about occupying territory. Using the roughest materials, Weck at the same time creates a blend of sculpture and painting. These become natural linchpins in the room, where they tell a raw tale of simultaneous decomposition and construction.

In the installation "We All Got One (Some Quite a Few)", the installation itself expresses a saying and an existential paradox: an old mahogany wardrobe with a mirror-clad door opens onto an enclosed space illuminated by a neon sign with a text. We all have skeletons in the cupboard (some more than others), but the paradox is that the neon sign banishes the darkness and illuminates its secrets. The installation thereby balances the greatest seriousness with satirical wit.

Ulrik Weck is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen. In 2009, he exhibited together with Jeppe Hein at Kunstverein und Stiftung Springhornhof, Neuenkirchen, Germany, and at SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan, as well as at Dépaysage (with Joachim Koester and Jeppe Hein), FRAC Basse-Normandie, France, and Circus Hein, FRAC Centre, Orléans, France. In 2009, Weck also exhibited at KURS:SØEN, West Zealand Museum of Contemporary Art, Sorø.