Anniversary auctions at Bukowskis presenting Klara Lidén

Klara Lidén (b. 1979) is an artist who has truly broken through and is now regularly exhibited internationally. Galleries in Berlin, London and New York represent her and she has already had several important museum exhibitions, including a solo show at the New Museum in New York, curated by Massimiliano Gioni of the Venice Biennale. Furthermore, her work has been shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London, at MoMa in New York, at Jeu de Paume and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and at the Venice Biennale. The art world’s heavyweight curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, has spoken of her as one of the great artists of the 21st century.

In November 2013 Klara Lidén was awarded the prestigious Friends of Moderna Museet Sculpture Prize. The jury’s statement read as follows:

“Klara Lidén is an artist who explores with precision the poetic and political possibilities of a space. Her sculptural works involve the body, architecture and the city in their examinations of the limits of the public and the private. In a number of exhibitions shown across the world, she has succeeded in extracting surprising artistic energies from everyday materials and spaces.”

Both in her films and her installations, we encounter an artist who refuses to exist in a mundane system and who refuses to be engulfed by societal and cultural structures. She de-constructs and re-constructs, she removes something from its context and gives it a new dwelling in another place.

Klara Lidén’s work was shown at Moderna Museet for the first time in 2007. She called her exhibition Unheimlich Manöver. What she did was to empty her flat of its entire contents. Every single thing was packed and pressed together into a gigantic mass, which was then displayed at the museum.

In 2008 she made the video The Myth of Progress (Moonwalk), in which she glides backwards through a nighttime New York. Her soft, floating reverse-walk clashes with the tempo of her surroundings and brings to mind a kind of parallel existence and the idea that several worlds co-exist without necessarily touching. This is also the case in other pieces, such as Self Portrait with Keys to the City (2005), where the viewer comes to understand that the city may consist of several different cultural and social layers, which Lidén is able to elegantly reshape and reveal. It is a recurrent theme that is still central to Lidén’s artistic practice. In the film Grounding from 2018, shown in her exhibition at Galerie Neu in 2019, a figure (the artist?) wanders through Lower Manhattan, suddenly collapsing, then getting up and continuing on, then collapsing again. This is repeated throughout the almost six-minute long film.