In the lovingly crafted collages by Jakob Kolding, the artist mixes his trademark visual vocabulary of modernist art and architecture, sociology phrases and characters from electronic music, comics and football. All these things seem to have overlapped in Koldings own upbringing in a suburb of Copenhagen and now form the ingredients of an ongoing work in progress. Kolding approaches the question of what happens when we let architecture structure our lives from a multitude of different angles. An idiosyncratic “Koldingesque” cityscape arises out of the mix, where one senses the artist’s own fascination and scepticism with the modernist utopias. In this urban space, art and architecture are often invaded, by people and phenomena that weren’t at all planned to exist there. One such figure is the skater who takes liberties with for example a minimalist sculpture by using it as a skateboard ramp.
In his collages he uncovers underlying ideas and attitudes behind our built environments and makes unexpected connections between popular culture and architecture in an effortless fusion of aesthetics and politics. In spite of his misgivings about settled life in the suburbs as envisioned by city planners, the artist betrays a clear preference for the spare design ideals of 60’s and 70’s architecture. A taste that recurs in the artist’s interest in the formal analogies between the repetitious beats of electronic music, modernist architecture and the paired down aesthetics of minimalist sculpture
The title of the exhibition Pattern Recognition refers to the process by which machines can find patterns in unclassified or randomly arranged information. The expression serves as a loosely held frame both for the works in the show and for the working method of the artist. Pattern Recognition spans 10 years of Jakob Kolding’s work. Audiences will find examples of most aspects of his art practice. There will be drawings from 1996, old and new collages, a documentation of public art projects, an improvised sculpture and examples of the artists sleeve design for the pop group St Etienne. Parts of the exhibition will be presented at OVERGADEN – Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen in the spring of 2007.
