Skulptur og gevær

Oslo Kunstforening is pleased to welcome back Tor Børresen, with a solo presentation titled Skulptur og gevær (Sculpture and rifle), showing new as well as older works in a comprehensive installation.

In 2016 Børresen was the recipient of The DNB Savings Bank's art grant. The jury described his work as balancing between humor and seriousness, and emphasized the tension between the individual works causing them to become charged objects.

The specters of Modernist heroes are haunting Børresen's new sculptures, as in Skulptur og gevær (Sculpture and rifle) which directly alludes to Brancusi’s Endless Column from 1918. Whilst the abstracted form in Brancusi's sculpture seems inaccessible, its tactile surface awakens feelings of intimacy that defy description. 

The titular work Skulptur og gevær (Sculpture and Rifle) also recalls Endless Coloumn and its abstracted form as well as Barbara Hepworth's Hand Sculpture (Turning Form) from 1953. Hepworth’s sculpture wasn’t fixed to a stand back then, one could pick it up and feel its soft surfaces and hollows. The surface of Børresen’s sculpture awakens feelings of intimacy that defy description – the same kind of tactile desire arises. Here, however, there is also a macabre invitation to kill one’s antecedents.

The audience is invited to perform vandalism on Børresen's rotating wooden sculpture, by shooting colourful arrows from an air rifle. Despite the carnivalesque scenario it's no easy task to destroy the seemingly vulnerable sculpture, fenced in and placed within the rifle’s range, throned on a white pedestal. The sculpture is presented as a symbol of the old, which together we must destroy to make way for the new, despite the discomfort associated with the action and guilt that is engendered. The sheltered sculpture illustrates a natural composting process where the dead is recycled and nourishes something new.

In the new video In the Beginning is the End, Børresen is inspired by Bob Dylan's legendary 1965 music video Subterranean Homesick Blues, with references to a United States in tumult. In Børresen's video we are met by a middle aged man and the big city in Dylan’s video has been replaced by a forest. The man pushes forward through the deep snow like a dystopian missionary – in his hands he holds a pile of signs that read "everything’s got to go", "The End" and "last day". Fifty years after Dylan's lyrics the message has become bitter cold. In the Beginning is the End is simultaneously deeply serious and playful.

The video is projected on the back of a road sign that is suspended across the room on steel wires, led together in a vanishing point. The road sign signifies stasis – a “dead end”. In the Beginning of the End is a harbinger of change, a double edged sword – both painful and necessary – both death and life.

In the beginning is the end is a continuation of the work LOOK ...!, which can be seen in room one and which was part of Børresen's presentation in The DNB Savings Bank's art grant exhibition in 2016. A steel arch, with a mini projector attached to it, is tucked up between floor and ceiling. A short video sequence is projected on the wall showing a worm coiling in a palm of a hand. During a short moment the worm appears to spell out a word.

Tor Børresen’s artworks turn familiar phenomena upside down. His material investigations create unexpected correlations between form and content. This requires us as viewers to renegotiate the contract with these double-agent objects. Børresen makes familiar forms and objects alien, forcing us to question the foundation upon which we interpret them.
 
Tor Børresen has been a fixture of the Oslo art scene for many years, as an artist and as co-founder and curator at Galleri Struts between 1994-1998. His latest solo exhibitions in Oslo took place at Kunstnerforbundet (2013) and Fotogalleriet (2010).

A conversation will take place Thursday, Nov 8 at 16:00 between Tor Børresen and Lotte Konow Kund. 

Tor Børresen Skulptur og gevær (Sculpture and rifle) has been generously supported by Vederlagsfondet and Arts Council Norway.