Artist:
Christian Andersson (born 1973 in Stockholm, Sweden; lives and works in Malmö, Sweden).

Materials:
Mixed media installation.

Description:
From Lucy With Love invites visitors to a limbo between modern utopia and a surrealist dream in the form of a monumental sculpture. In the middle of the exhibition space is a sort of incomplete timeline, a contemporary curiosity cabinet, where the artist destabilizes the museum’s power and role as upholder of the truth. Christian Andersson triggers fleeting doubts in order to put our powers of perception to the test, juxtaposing sense and sensibility.

“Christian Andersson presents a panoply of references. Distinct art historic references to Magritte and surrealism in the exhibition’s largest work are interspersed with more implicit allusions to conspiracy theories and literature. The clearest link is perhaps the one to the architect Mies van der Rohe and his Barcelona pavilion, which was demolished in 1930 and reconstructed in 1980 on the exact same site in Barcelona. Christian Andersson, in turn, has constructed an abstract replica of a part of the pavilion for his exhibition at Moderna Museet Malmö. History, the modernist utopian dream, is consciously repeated a third time.”
–Press release, “Christian Andersson: From Lucy With Love,” Moderna Museet website.

“From Lucy With Love, Christian Andersson’s largest solo show to date, at the Moderna Museet in Malmö earlier this year, framed Lucy as the centerpiece of a historically ambiguous museological display straddling truth and fiction. Other references included Edward Bellamy’s visionary novel, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), which tells the story of Julian West, who falls into a hypnotic sleep in the late 19th century and awakens 113 years later in a socially Utopian United States, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, a watershed of modern architecture, which survived but a year after its construction in 1929 and was justly rebuilt in 1986. What’s the connection? That’s not apparent, but try this: like Julian West, Mies’ pavilion was ‘put to sleep’ only to wake up in the body of its own reconstruction, eyes wide open to the future it envisioned.”
–Ronald Jones, “Focus: Christian Andersson,” Frieze, June 1, 2011.