ESSAY & CONVERSATION
ELLEN HYLLEMOSE
LIM MELLEM LANDSKABER
18 JUNE – 14 AUGUST 2011
PLEASE JOIN US FOR THE PREVIEW
17 JUNE, 5-8PM
Ellen Hyllemose challenges everyday perception in a series of new works which
playfully activate the space between sculpture and painting.
ESSAY
Ellen Hyllemose – Across
the Boundary between Work
and World
By Anne Ring Petersen
If one views Hyllemose’s artistic
output all together, i.e. as oeuvre,
then one would find that she uses a
register, which comprises painting,
sculpture, utensils, architectural
surroundings and the social world,
where objects acquire meaning
through what we do with them, and
through the contexts in which we
use them, the experiences we have
of them, and the cultural memories
and ’stories’, we attach to them.
It is the interweaving of the everyday practical contexts that supply
the objects of the social world with
their meaning. In this way, they distinguish themselves from the works
in an art exhibition, where the primary function of the objects is to
be objects on view that provide images and make signs, which may
nourish the impressions, experiences and reflections of the viewers.
As Marcel Duchamp has already
demonstrated with his readymades, a utensil transports its
everyday cultural meanings along
with itself into the artistic sphere,
when it is shown as a work. The social, cultural and economic meaning of the factory-made urinal thus
still adheres to Duchamp’s Fountain
(1917), although, in the world of art,
is has been liberated from its practical function and has been supplied
with the display function of an art
work. Like Duchamp, Ellen Hyllemose is preoccupied with the transformation that objects made for
practical use may undergo, when
they are inserted in an aesthetic
context, as happens when, for instance, utensils from a now vanished agrarian culture are elevated to serve as decorative objects
displayed on the walls of the living
room or in a display cabinet. She
does not work with ready-made objects in a traditional sense, but she
includes, to a remarkable degree,
industrially manufactured materials from everyday living in her often untitled works. In the following,
I shall take a closer look at Hyllemose’s materials and artistic moves
with the purpose of providing an
answer to the question of how her
seemingly rather uncommunicative,
physical and formal works generate a meaningful content. Let it be
said initially: there are limits as to
how far one may reach with such
attempts at interpretation, for Hyllemose’s predilection for covering
up, camouflage, and displacements
nearing the invisible imply that her
works actively resist interpretation.
Paintings with Physique
As mentioned, Ellen Hyllemose
is no mere finder of objects. Her
preserves are rather the DIYs, the
paint and textile shops, where she
in the company of the DIY-people
and the homemakers select materials for her works from the assorted goods of the season. She
highlights and reinforces the immanent qualities and colours of the
materials through the juxtaposition
with other materials and through
an abstract formal language borrowed from the sphere of art. Hyllemose’s works never fit seamlessly
into any art historical category, not
even her paintings. Not only does
she prefer MDF board, hardboard
or other construction materials as
her ground of painting rather than
prepared canvases. She also equips
her paintings with signs of functionality. In an early series of paintings,
created for the exhibition Yoga for
Women at Overgaden in 1992, she
underscored the connection with
DIY-activities and utensils, as she
with a calculated clumsiness and
brutality equipped the hardboard
ground of the paintings with drilled
holes, standard handles, bolts and
wooden mouldings. Hyllemose’s
works always have this element of
‘low-tech’ and an affinity with DIY,
domestic tenacity and homemade
design. To date she has avoided artists’ colours and instead opted for
industrial paint that people use in
their homes and around the house,
sometimes mixed with pigment and
glue. But the ‘colour material’ may
also consist of other elements: Hyllemose may attach glazed paper of
varying colour to the paint ground
using coloured drawing-pins, or she
may draw stripes or lines of colour
and with ordinary cello-tape, wires,
elastic bands or nylon ropes. The
fact that she creates colour compositions with solid substances that
are tangible underscores the material and physical character of her
works. When she uses materials
such as glazed paper, drawing-pins
and cello-tape, she draws on colour
scales that are given – ready-made
– and on the burgeoning shopping
the constitution of the work, and
she reminds the viewer that art
works are always situated in time
and space, never elevated beyond
their historical context. There is
hence often an installational aspect
to the way in which Ellen Hyllemose
shows her works, even when they
are two-dimensional pictures hung
on a wall. In a series of glazed paper collages from 1999, the thick
drying line, on which the individual
paintings are hung, has been shifted to the front and hence comes
into the picture moving into the
foreground, not just of the composition, but also of the viewer’s
experience. This thematisation of
the very installation is particularly
marked in the cases where Hyllemose has tilted a hardboard surface, ‘painted’ with strips of tape
in an irregular criss-cross pattern,
from the wall itself by suspending the board in a long iron chain
attached to a point in the wall. By
tilting the board from the wall, she
creates an unusual tension between
surface and space, gesturing towards the fluid boundaries between
painting and sculpture, wall and
floor. The series of four boards that
she showed at the exhibition Fact
and Value (2000) was placed high
on the wall. To underscore the corporeal act of lifting, necessary to
hang paintings, the two holes in the
side of the board, where the chain
was attached, were large enough
for a hand and hence big enough to
serve as gripping holes.
As the art historian, Mikkel Bogh,
writes, Hyllemose’s works often
situate themselves in space so
that they create a tension between
framing and expansion. The two
contrary forces are articulated especially clearly within the pictorial and plastic fields, respectively,
while not being confined to these.
Hyllemose draws on the painting
Hyllemose’s works always have this element of ‘low-tech’ and an affinity
with DIY, domestic tenacity and homemade design.
shelves of Western culture. In the
spirit of Duchamp, she thus allows
the manufacturers to deploy the
historical and cultural watermark of
consumer culture within the colour
scale of her paintings.
It is normally easy to discern how
Hyllemose’s works have come into
this world, for as regards construction, she hides nothing. On the contrary, she follows the principle of
post-minimalism: that all the acts
that have shaped the creation of
the work must be discernible in the
finished work by way of visible traces. Hence the acts that generate
the pictorial element in her works
will often appear as the very motivation for her work.1 In accordance
with this artistic principle, she also
underscores the positioning of the
works within the physical surroundings by highlighting how they are
installed. She thus emphasises that
the hanging is never a neutral formality, but it actively forms part of
with its frames, surfaces, colours
and two-dimensionality, but she
likes to challenge this painterly discourse by simultaneously drawing on the discourse of sculpture. 2
It is thus characteristic that one
always has to first experience Hyllemose’s paintings as physical objects in the room, before one may
take them in as paintings. This applies to the distended paintings on
hardboard sheets, but also to the
more recent series of paintings,
where the surface is partially hidden by a cover sown in elastic lycra
fabrics. The fabrics may be white,
shine-through, so that the underlying motif may be eyed through the
covering, as a suggestion of a piece
of nature or landscape. The fabrics,
however, just as often function as
a covering camouflage that almost
hides the painted motif behind a
pre-fabricated monochrome in pastel green, soft peach, mild light
purple, warm orange red, glowing
lime green, electric neon pink, or
whichever colour the fashion of the
season has made the fabric shops
order for stock.
Technically the paintings are cloth­
ed with a textile bag, that is, a useful object that in everyday living
serves many functions and hence
also has many meanings. A textile
bag may serve as a ‘pillow cover’,
to ‘cover-up’ or to ‘contain’ during
the Netherlands, the covering was a
practical measure that had nothing
to do with the motif. Nonetheless,
it was, during the 1650s and 1660s,
particularly with the illusory painting, the so-called trompe l’oeil, customary for Flemish artists to supply
their motifs with an illusory covering, which gave to the paintings an
additional effect of framing. 3 Hyllemose’s coverings are neither prac-
There is hence often an installational aspect to the way in which Ellen
Hyllemose shows her works, even when they are two-dimensional pictures
hung on a wall.
‘transport’, ‘storage’, ‘protection’,
or ‘wrapping’. Thanks to the elastic
swimwear material, the textile bag
also holds reference to the clothing
of the body and hence in a wider
sense the corporeal and thus also
the corporeal aspect of the paintings that the bags are stretched to
cover.
On a number of occasions, Hyllemose has put together the textiles
into variegated colour compositions
by gathering several covered paintings into a larger polychrome cluster. Often she extends the canvases from a corner so that the walls
appear to be almost plastered with
them creating an installation-like
intimate atmosphere, suggestive of
a homely interior. The intimate element is underscored by the presence of the clothing textiles. Although Hyllemose has selected the
materials herself, one could hardly
say that she uses a distinctly personal colour scale in the traditional
sense, where the palette of the artist is taken to be a direct expression of the artist’s mental state or
unique individual temperament.
The colour scale of the textiles are
not generating any particular mood
and express neither ‘sorrow’, nor
‘joy’, ‘euphoria’ or ‘melancholy’. It
is characterised by being outward
rather than inward: like the paintings with tape, drawing-pins and
glazed paper, the lycra-covered
paintings contain an imprint of the
surrounding consumer culture, but
the juxtaposition of the colours of
the textiles still render a subjective element to the colour composition. As in Hyllemose’s other works
one senses a predilection for landscape colours, rather light delicate
tones with associations of fields,
sky and sea. But alternatively, one
also finds a tendency for strong
gleaming colours signalling urban
metropolis, contrasts, or even confrontation. When Hyllemose lets the
two scales meet in one work, it is
thus as if the colours play through a
classical confrontation between nature and city.
It is important to bear in mind that
these paintings are not ‘finished’
paintings without having the textile.
Only in a state of being covered is
the work complete. The use of cover marks a connection to 17th Century Holland, where it was customary to protect the painting by way
of a hanging cover. In the suites of
tical nor illusory. They are, on the
contrary, integrated as a physical
element in the composition of the
painting.
As part of the works, they do, as
home-sown textile bags, serve to
initiate a series of associations that
could, for instance, move from domestic diligence and the home, via
body and fashion, on to industrial
manufacturing and contemporary
colour chemicals. The abrupt confrontations between sharp colours
are like an echo of our experience
of colour in an urban metropolis,
which Hyllemose herself lives in:
that is, an experience of confrontations rich in contrast, very different from our experience of colours
in nature such as the Danish, where
the colour scale is soft most of the
year. As the British artist and writer David Batchelor has noted, the
urban environment of the last 100
years seems to have undergone a
colour revolution, as colours nowa-days have a tendency to being
electronically and petro-chemically
manufactured. It is plastic objects,
artificial materials, electric signposts and electronic screens that
‘carry’ the colours by which we
are surrounded in our daily living.
This artificial status of colours is
what Hyllemose seems to be commenting on with the lycra material,
which lies as an artificial membrane
across the ‘nature-driven’ paintings – as a simultaneously extrinsic
and intrinsic part of the paintings
and of the colour view of the current times.
This is an extract from Anne Ring Petersen's
text, published in the book that Ellen
Hyllemose will launch at the opening of the
exhibition.
Anne Ring Petersen is Associate Professor at
the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
at the University of Copenhagen.
Notes
1. Mikkel Bogh, ‘Ellen Hyllemose. Faktiske
billeder’, Ellens Cabaret, Catalogue # 6 from
Galleri Tom Christoffersen 2005, pp. 13-19;
p. 15.
2. Mikkel Bogh, ‘Ellen Hyllemose. Faktiske billeder’, pp. 15-16.
3. Olaf Koester, ‘Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts – en introduktion’, Blændværker. Gijsbrechts Kongernes Illusionsmester, Olaf
Koester (ed.), Statens Museum for Kunst
1999, Copenhagen, pp. 14-73; pp. 15-16.
CONVERSATION
Over the years, Ellen Hyllemose,
Lise Nørholm and Camilla Nørgård
have worked together on several
exhibitions, including Maddag (Food
Day) at Amagerfælledvej in 2007,
Hennings pressening (Henning’s
Tarpaulin) at Dunk in 2009, and
most recently Negle, såler, sol og
nøgler (Nails, Soles, Sun and Keys)
at Momentan in 2010. The following conversation arose in the same
dynamic manner as when the three
artists collaborate on a project –
through immediate reflections, input, thoughts and shared editing.
LN & CN Why did you choose to
make this exhibition at Overgaden –
and without us!?
EH Actually, it all started when
there was a water damage in my
cellar, and a lot of old works from
the 90s were destroyed. Then when
I began to restore the damaged
works, using the same working
methods and motifs as back then,
I revisited all the old thoughts and
ideas. Basically, it was an attempt
to revive that enthusiasm – I asked
myself what it was that had inspired
the works back then.
This process gave rise to some
small landscape paintings, several
of which have been included in the
exhibition. They contain some elements of the old works, but have
been brought up to date with divisions, partly hidden motifs and
nature – and they are not covered
with Lycra, as I have done in recent
years. So they are not merely reconstructions of old works.
LN & CN Why does the exhibition
have the title Lim mellem landskaber (Glue Between Landscapes)?
Landscapes can apparently be
anything?
EH Initially, I began with actual
land­scapes, but gradually these
have become a form – an unsentimental relationship with nature, a
con­structed and structured nature.
And the ‘glue between landscapes’
is about joining two things together – it might be the glue that is interesting, or it might be the landscapes. The title was inspired by
one of my children’s school assignments, which was called Lim mellem atomer (Glue Between Atoms).
I liked the contrast between something as simple as glue and big concepts such as atoms, or, as here,
landscapes.
LN & CN Perhaps it is precisely that
join, the clash, rather than the thing
in itself (or at least, not always...)
that is important in our works. This
applies quite specifically in the construction of a picture, or in a broader sense, in a collaboration. There
is a kind of displacement of a fixed
point, something that is not necessarily intended to result in something else, but which draws strength
from being constantly under construction – a bit like Camilla’s work
Permanent camping. Like a work
that has been temporarily halted, in
a cycle that never comes to en end?
EH Yes, the glue can provide the
displaced focus. The remnants that
remain in the workshop, and which
are sometimes better than the work
itself, if you can grasp the chance
configurations of piles of items, juxtapositions, colours and strange
shapes that arise – what you see
out of the corner of your eye while
you are doing something else. I use
this kind of chance as the basis for
a work and make it my own.
LN & CN Can you talk a little bit
about the materials and colours in
your works? Form and colour are
linked – they have equal weight. It
is as though they provide form and
content at once. How is this?
EH The materials I use are often
things that you can buy in normal
shops and builders’ suppliers. I use
intermediate products. I mean, not
things like a pot that have a finished form and function.
The colour is often determined by
what you can get in the shop, but
the material itself is used in another way. You see it with new eyes –
you see the materials again. There
must be a certain credibility – the
logic in the functionality that things
have. Stretch fabric is like that, and
the way it functions is that I utilise
the stretch in the fabric to model a
sculptural form, which can both retain a shape and reveal and wrap
tightly around what is underneath,
so that you can see the structure.
Or sheets of MDF – a cheap, commonplace building material that I
cut up and construct with. In this
way you can follow the material
part of the way, on the basis of the
knowledge you already have about
it. When combined in a work, the
functionality moves more into the
background and gives way to something else. It becomes part of the
foundation materials: the fabric becomes basis for a particular colour,
and the paint takes on the colour
of the material and creates connections – both within the individual works and between the works.
In the first room of the exhibition
at Overgaden, I have for example
juxtaposed silver Lycra fabric with
shiny, silver-coloured metal tubing. Elsewhere the Lycra is brown
like an MDF sheet, so that the inner
material exchanges meaning with
the outer layer. When the fabric is
stretched tightly across the MDF
sheet, it acts like a colour layer.
LN & CN Your way of selecting materials and allowing them to direct
the working process is very similar
to the way we work with materials in
our joint exhibitions.
EH Yes, they are almost always
quite unpretentious materials.
In both Hennings pressening and
Maddag, we took an almost archaeological approach. We found things
in the local area and in the exhibition room. We found for example
colours on a wire, which we subsequently decided to paint with. More
physical and temporal layers arise
during the process, as a part of the
whole thing. Instead of discarding
works, they are overlaid... In Hennings pressening we placed the remains under a tent canvas and in
Maddag behind the door, where
they were only partially hidden, in
order to reveal the process as an
important element of the construction – to show that what is deleted
is an essential element in the meaning of the work. It is also a way of
getting the new eminence of the
simple materials down to a level
at which things fall into place, and
where you can breathe again...
LN & CN And what about the work-
Ellen Hyllemose, Untitled, 2010
ing process? What is that like?
Mine is certainly slow. I never know
where it will end up. I start in one
corner and it usually ends up becoming something else entirely.
EH The working process is visible. I
use ‘fast’ or almost sketch-like materials. The materials must be able
to tolerate the fast workflow, and
the practical side is always relatively quick. On the other hand, I have
a long period of sketching in which
I investigate the possibilities of the
given space. I usually have a starting point, like at Overgaden, where
I knew I wanted to create a very
large sculpture in the back space
and show a selection of the aforementioned small paintings that
were based on older works.
Then I plan and build up the rest
of the show in the sketch phase in
order to create a relationship between the works – for example via a
movement that goes into the space
and uses its form to indicate something about the space. At Overgaden, I have for example worked
with the length of the middle room,
the format of the floor and the masonite panels. In this way, I also involve the body’s movement through
the rooms towards the large figure
in the rear room, which you have to
move around to see it all. The figure
itself is a kind of landscape, but you
can also see other small, detailed
landscapes in the landscape as you
move around it – small prospects,
of the kind you might experience on
a walk, or in a Japanese print with
several landscapes combined in one
picture.
Materiality and the various materials are important in the experience
of the works. Details and the body
interest me. Developments obviously happen to the exhibition along
the way at the site, but I’m quite
loyal towards my initial plan.
LN & CN A new feature is that you
use appliqués on your Lycra bags.
could also think of giant pillows with
ornamentation and decoration, or
of painting a design on a surface, or
a tattoo on a body. From the material’s initial properties of being flat
and colourful, it became a spatial
colour mass that could be modelled
into the sculptures on the spot, and
as the small motifs with seams were
laid on the surface instead of being
sewn into a single surface, it once
again became something paintinglike.
has fabric around it, including on
the back. It is not just an object for
painting, because there is a motif on the panels, which in turn are
painting-like, and I also often partly
cover the paintings. So there are
layers upon layers. The fabric is
both a colour surface and a bag.
You could say that I attempt to exploit and utilise doubt or resistance
as a kind of counter-movement,
which I use to question the painting-like and sculptural, the ways in
which we use various materials, and
the manner in which we usually perceive them. I always return to several different materials. I think of
sculpture when I paint, and of painting when I am working with the spatial. It is not enough just to paint, or
only to work spatially.
This movement between sculpture
and painting is something that recurs in several of my works, for example in the corner pictures, with
which you have to move in a completely different way than when
viewing a frontal ‘view picture’.
The corner pictures are made up
of several surfaces, and each panel
CV
Ellen Hyllemose (b. 1968) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy in
1995. She has had solo exhibitions at Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, 1999; Galleri
Tom Christoffersen, 2004; Holstebro Kunstmuseum, 2006; Galleri Specta,
2006 and 2009, and Galerie Nord (in collaboration with Barbara Wille), Berlin 2010. Furthermore her work has been included in several group shows,
e.g. at the exhibition Carnegie Art Award, 2008; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, 2009; Kunsthallen Brandts, 2010 and Rundetårn, 2010. She has
realised a number of public commisions, most lately at Vestforbrændingen
in Glostrup with expected completion in the summer of 2011. Ellen Hyllemose
lives in Copenhagen.
CONVERSATION
Thursday 23 June at 5pm Ellen Hyllemose will give a guided tour in her
ex­hibition in conversation with the two artists Tumi Magnússon and Torgny
Wilcke.
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
Friday 2 September 2011 Overgaden presents the group exhibition Terms
of Belonging with Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Kajsa Dahlberg, Luca Frei,
Olivia Plender, Pia Rönicke & Nis Römer, Superflex, Johan Tirén and Althea
Thauberger, curated by Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, as well as an exhibition with Cevdet Erek and Ahmet Ögüt, curated by Celenk Bafra and Kathrine
Bolt Rasmussen. The last day of the exhibitions is 30 October 2011
Ellen Hyllemose would like to thank Morten Agergaard, Niels Erik Jensen,
Tumi Magnússon, Michael Münchow, Camilla Nørgård, Lise Nørholm, Overgaden, Anne Ring Petersen and Torgny Wilcke.
Translation: Michael Münchow & Billy O’Shea
EH The idea of using appliqués
arose after I had created a sculpture that was intended to be a
closed form. The stitching suddenly became an interesting process,
because it made me think of a scar,
or of stitches on a human body, and
because the material was returned
to its original condition as a material, and thereby became more than
just a colour, mass or surface. You
This exhibition folder can be downloaded from www.overgaden.org
Overgaden is supported by The Danish Arts Council’s Commitee for Visual Arts
Overgaden. Institute of Contemporary Art, Overgaden Neden Vandet 17, DK-1414 Copenhagen K, + 45 3257-7273, info@overgaden.org, www.overgaden.org. Tuesday-Sunday 1-5pm, Thursday 1-8pm
Design: Anni’s