FREEEee at BRAUNSFELDER
Text
Notes on the works in the exhibition:
An onion and a bell are placed next to one another on a white tabletop. The table has been interfered with through acts of reduction. Each of these interventions are named in a language that fictionalises the impact of these actions. The table is from Ikea and is called MELLTORP.
Medium sized paintings trace the length of the human digestive tract in red permanent marker. White enamel is used to erase these lines, only for them to be drawn again in a similar manner. At times, clear PVC is stretched across an entire canvas, like a skin that stops or conceals a process. In dark purple acrylic paint two marks are made at the approximate size of an anus and a mouth.
A Mi Body Composition Scale 2 is hanging in a pictorial manner. It has been activated with four AAA batteries and holds the data of a median male.
FREEEee is a text that runs over 32 pages. Part folksong part lecture, it probes the parameters of corporeal and intellectual deliberation, of essayistic logic and poetic neglect, via a series of encounters with current and deceased thinkers.
Large scale paintings feature the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9, an onion, some indexical language, and acrylic paint on white PVC.
A photo taken from the grey painted MDF step leading into the exhibition space, as you cross the radiator that runs below the windows facing the street, is stuck directly onto the gallery’s wall.
One medium sized painting was photographed from just above the painting’s upper edge, at a slight angle. Its image is mounted in oak frames.
Two box-fresh MELLTORPS are in the exhibition, but not claimed as works. They are proof of the emptying out and stripping down of social imagination, of bodily dimensions and of life. They are clearly facist in nature.
FREEEee is Jesper List Thomsen’s first solo presentation in Germany. The exhibition brings a body of work to a close that has been researched, rehearsed and made public between 2019 and 2020 at Hot Wheels Athens, South London Gallery and Parhesiades, London. Alongside and in parallel List Thomsen has been writing and editing the text FREEEee under the auspices of l’Esprit de l’Escalier. Its publication coincides with the exhibition at Braunsfelder.
The exhibition is generously supported by the The Danish Arts Foundation.