Frieze London 2024

The title of Danh Vo’s 17.01.1980 refers to the date the photo was taken. Vo’s first passport photo shows him wearing a girl’s dress his family had been gifted by a Christian charity. Following the 1975 fall of Saigon to North-Vietnamese forces, the new communist regime initiated reeducation programs and force relocations, which lead many Vietnamese citizens to leave the country. Vo’s family escaped on a self-built boat, which was intercepted by a Danish shipping freighter. The family was later granted refuge in Denmark.

Untitled (Self-portrait as Carrie) depicts Danh Vo posing for a typical Danish school portrait. The title references the main character Stephen King’s horror movie Carrie. In the context of Vo’s artistic practice, which is often based around his own biography, the work may be read as a visual representation of the individual’s struggle to integrate into a new system. Vo often uses family photographs for his photogravure projects, embedding his own family’s biography in a wider historical context.

A woman’s face is seen through a cloverleaf-shaped opening. The white foreground emphazises the act of looking as it creates an opening from which the woman comes into view. Individual details are accentuated using the blind embossing technique, which highlights sections of the work by printing without ink. Frida Orupabo has consistently reminded us of the power of the gaze and the impact of images by letting figures re-emerge as active subjects that refuse to be objectified. Clover I and II depict the actress Carol Speed portraying the title character in the 1974 blaxploitation horror movie Abby. Orupabo utilises the contradictory potential of her imagery by detaching it from its original context: formerly the object of the viewer’s voyeuristic gaze, the portrayed figure now stares back out of the image. Isolated from the film plot, it becomes possible to re-interpret her frothing facial expression perhaps as anger, despair or disgust in the face of the exploitative gaze to which she is subjected.

Wardell Milan’s large-scale prints are complex, multi-layered compositions that combine a myriad of etching techniques. They depict human bodies immersed in arcadian landscapes, which were drawn on copper plates with etching needles, brushes and acid. Milan’s new prints offer an almost utopian counterproposal to his previous etchings, which referred to the political and social reality of the United States with explicit and at times brutal honesty.
For all their serenity, the etchings still present the human body as fundamentally political: his protagonists interact not through words, but through body language and touch; they seem removed from societal power struggles, but they still negotiate social relationships through sexual and spiritual intimacy.
Milan carefully planned and executed the individual pictorial elements, but deliberately delayed decisions regarding the overall compositions until the individual printing plates were assembled for proofing. He thus combines the signature technical precision of his work on copper plates with the intuitive feel for the construction of multi-layered pictorial spaces, which he developed through his practice in the medium of collage.

Andreas Eriksson’s etchings bear his painterly signature of working on the border between figuration and abstraction. Meditative terrains emerge from arrangements of coloured surfaces. Eriksson’s choice of colours radiates intention. Nevertheless, the colour palette of Skimmer is surprising, ranging from soft, muted pastel shades to strikingly bright, almost neon-like tones. Andreas Eriksson has further developed a sandblasting drypoint technique, which he had first experimented with for his print Risberg, 2022. The final etching is composed from the five individually sandblasted plates printed on top of one another, so that the different shapes meet and overlap. The print titled Risberg, refers to Dalarna in central Sweden. The coniferous forests and large hilly granite terrain that are found in this area have inspired a rich topography of tonalities.

The photogravure series Dead Budgie Project is based on amateur photographs that Tacita Dean found and reproduced in a larger format, employing the sensitive, grainy tactility of the photogravure. Memory is narrative by nature, and in Dead Budgie Project, the various scenes follow each other in a classic, forward-moving narrative. From the owner’s warm relationship with her bird to its life inside and outside its cage until it drops form its perch, lying dead at the bottom of its cage, and is buried in a padded box decorated with flowers.
Dean has appropriated someone else’s memories, and through her mediating act, she points out that a memory of something always takes place in the here and now. It shapes our insight into the past as well as the present. It is a corrective to the future.

Throughout her oeuvre, Mamma Andersson has explored and reshaped the genres of still life, interiors, and landscapes. In these prints Andersson expresses haunting moods of quiet mystery, and subtle connections appear through their colours and scenic atmospheres. Potpurri is striking for its combination of a still life composition against a background of a sepia toned stylized landscape, while the two other etchings Morgon and Bakgård convey idyllic scenes of a meandering river and a sheer cliff face in the landscape. Butterflies light up at dawn in Morgon, while a river winding its way through the landscape makes up the main motif. The image is an open invitation to become immersed in nature as the scenery dissolves into the horizon. In contrast, a view of the landscape is abruptly blocked by a looming mountainside that dominates Bakgård, while a delicately glowing sky appears in the background through the trees. In their own right, each etching is a testimony to Andersson’s uncanny ability to translate unspoken moods into imagery through her use of a combination of intaglio techniques, giving voice to her striking visual language. Tactile qualities of nature are evoked with the combined use of finely etched lines, the blurs of the drypoint technique, together with the painterly brushstroke effects of spit bite and sugar lift aquatints.