STOCKHOLM.- Moderna Museet is presenting the exhibition Stripped, featuring Danish artist Lea Porsager. The exhibition features new works, where human meets non-human in an exploration of science, mysticism and feminism. In this first major museum presentation of Lea Porsager, visitors will encounter an artistic practice that explores the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical, making Porsager one of the most talked about Nordic contemporary artists today.
Lea Porsager’s artistic practice is consistently characterised by her fascination for spirituality and physics, especially quantum physics. She approaches these fields from a feminist and queer perspective. The works are speculative and imaginative, at once both material and immaterial. The art is engendered in a spirit of gravity mixed with irony, where the grave aspect consists of penetrating as deeply as possible into the material, while irony is a disruptive force that occasionally borders on vulgarity.
“It is there – in that elastic interval – that I discern a potential to go beyond representations and dogma, to open new spaces,” says Lea Porsager. “I am attracted to science, mysticism and feminism because all three subjects are open, wild and raw, albeit in very different ways. They can challenge each other where they intersect and separate. This gives rise to a vibration, movement or collision that I am interested in exploring.”
With an oeuvre spanning both physical and metaphysical themes, Lea Porsager uses a wide array of artistic practices: she devotes her practice equally to sculpture, filmmaking, writing and research. The exhibition STRIPPED consists entirely of new works, including magnetic prayer wheels, icon paintings and 3D animations. The largest element in the exhibition is three wings from a wind turbine that have been cut into slices. Like a fallen giant on the museum floor, this processed readymade will be matched with an almost twenty-metre long cushion – a beanbag shaped like a fourth turbine wing – offering visitors a place to sit down in the middle of the sculptural work.
“Ever since Cervantes, windmills have symbolised the power of the human imagination. The great mystic Emanuel Swedenborg also dreamt that he was knocked on the head by a windmill wing – giving him visions of new cosmic connections. Lea’s exhibition takes us to the limits of our imagination and asks us if we can expand our ideas – and if we have any choice but to try, if we want to change ourselves and our relationship to the world,” says the exhibition curator, Lars Bang Larsen.
Lea Porsager was born in 1981 in Frederikssund and graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. She is currently working on her PhD at the Malmö Art Academy, with a project titled Cunt-Splicing Thought-Forms. Promiscuous play with quantum physics and spirituality. In 2012, Lea Porsager participated in dOCUMENTA(13), and three years later she took part in the 14th Istanbul Biennial. In 2018, Lea Porsager’s work Gravitational Ripples, a memorial for the casualties of the tsunami disaster in South East Asia, was inaugurated. This earthwork, a tribute to the Swedish victims, can be seen at Djurgården in Stockholm. Lea Porsager has exhibited all over the world – including galleries and museums in Chicago, Tallinn, Melbourne and Berlin. She lives and works in Copenhagen, and the exhibition at Moderna Museet will be her first solo show in Sweden.
“Lea Porsager is one of the absolutely most interesting contemporary artists on the Nordic art scene. There is an immediate attractiveness of her works, on account of being both physically appealing and imbued with an infinite number of layers and narratives. In STRIPPED, she takes command of the space in a way we have never seen before. We are delighted with this opportunity to share Lea Porsager’s unique and astonishing works with our visitors,” says Gitte Ørskou, director of Moderna Museet.
