studies/play. Luca Frei
Lund Konsthall 19 April – 11 May 2008

Lund Konsthall Production is a new programme, a series of works and presentations by younger artists from our own region that will be realised during three years. It is inaugurated by Luca Frei. His exhibition studies / play is staged around the building’s architecture.

Luca Frei works with designed environments, geometric sculptural forms, abstract collages and graphic design. Aesthetical and pared down, his works usually start with a specific place and a given context. They often function as relays between the space and the body, and are meant to be activated by the viewers.

The exhibition for Lund Konsthall becomes a visual survey of how the viewers and their patterns of movement relate to the architecture. It departs from the open surfaces in the front and rear halls on the ground floor, and the shift of perspective that occurs when visitors climb the stairs and view these rooms from the upper floor.

On the floor of the lower front gallery there are white sheets of paper, whose width corresponds to the thickness of the building’s carrying walls. The papers become a map, hinting at a hypothetical subdivision of the space into smaller units. In the rear gallery there is a structure, consisting of twenty-seven wooden cubes, painted white and reaching the level of the upper floor balcony. On the wall there is a drawing, coiling up from the floor to the balcony rail. In the upper gallery there is a series of collages.

For Luca Frei the artwork is an intermediary, not a goal in itself. In this exhibition he unhinges, with a few precise interventions, his own preconceptions about the institution’s architecture. He enters into dialogue with the space and thereby indirectly with the viewer and their thoughts.

For the exhibition Luca Frei has produced a booklet containing an interview by the Argentinian philosopher Santiago García Navarro. The brochure is free of charge for visitors to the exhibition.

Luca Frei was born 1976 in Lugano, Switzerland. He lives and works in Lund and Malmö. He is educated at Edinburgh College of Art and the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University.