Solo exhibition at Galleri Duerr 11/11-11/12-2021
With Daniel Franzén as the newest addition to our artist roster, Galleri Duerr is pleased to present his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Coming from a background within architecture and street art, Franzén’s artistic activities have throughout the years been highly engaged with the shared public space, which he now interlaces into his works of art. For this exhibition, both new and old works will be shown, as well as one major site-specific work made exclusively for Galleri Duerr as a permanent installation.
The exhibition title draws upon Brian O’Doherty’s now-legendary Inside the White Cube essays that first appeared in Artforum in 1976. Arguing that the crispy white gallery space is a far from neutral zone, but rather a container of values, O’Doherty unfolded underlying ideologies of the space now commonly known as ”the white cube”. Being interested in such values connected to spaces in which art appears, Daniel Franzén’s exhibition Outside the White Cube sets out to twist and turn these into an exhibition that does not necessarily comply with ordinary white cube aesthetics. With this, certain binary pairs of concepts are called into question, such as inside-outside, private-public and high-low art.
By assembling works of art that have their origins from both intimate as well as public spaces, he attempts to merge different sets of values connected to various kinds of contexts. One clear example is his series of paintings titled Wallpaper (2020-2021). Created with materials such as old wallpaper, found scrap paper and leftovers from other artists’ works, these paintings form collages with multilayered provenances. One piece of wallpaper might be snatched from an abandoned house and another might be bought at a flea market. With this, each painting bears traces of stories of different times, individuals and spaces.
The site-specific work I´d rather be somewhere else (2021), made specifically for this exhibition, consists of three parts: a painting, a documentation video and a hidden installation adjacent to the gallery space. With respect for the artist’s wish to keep the work a secret, the hidden part will be revealed first during the official opening of the exhibition. All we can say now is that the vast installation was made one night after Franzén kindly asked us for a sleepover at the gallery. As it turned out, he had decided to literally puncture our beloved white cube…