tongue gloves trick trees

Straighten your back, close your eyes and take a deep breath. Imagine now that everything could be different. Within the next fifteen minutes our imaginary worlds will be combined with the one we are living now, we are going to experience simultaneously different time periods of the history and through the medium of painting, a window to fantastic realities will open up. Welcome to tongue gloves trick trees of Minda Andrén. Rethinking the postmodernist way of living – the act of reinterpreting the fundaments of western philosophy – and trying to consider humanity facing a post-postmodern / capitalist era, we still find time to let our imagination roam freely and to create our own loopholes.  The practice of painting can be interpretated as a literal representation of the existence between an inner and outer world. Andrén depicts this co-existence of two worlds with the use of overlapping structures, which she draws from various bedroom scenes within medieval paintings. By reducing the elements into architectural patterns, the once clear image becomes fractured, just like our fading memory with the course of time. The fragmented painting connects its subjects with the surroundings through an inversion of colors and the use of blurry outlines. After gazing upon the painting and closing one’s eyes, the colors leave a path of vivid memories, creating new images in each mind. Colors and obscure outlines, inversions, overlapping structures compose our first impression. In the current exhibition seven paintings and two drawings are shown, through which Andrén explores in her artistic practice the borders between reality and imaginary. Her two paintings Twins I & II show two horses each, close like twins, bodily entangled but fractured by the use of color at the same time. Fragments of memory drawn from historical facades and porcelain figurines. We find the same use of technique in Andrén’s paintings Monica and Gloves, the first depicting a muscular female bodybuilder, who is painted after a fitness influencer. The painting shows only the bodybuilders upper body, implying blurry boarders between what we see and what is beyond the immediate visible. The second painting Gloves depicts metal gloves with connotations of medieval armor parts, now bedded in soft colors. The softness through the use of color is also visible in her paintings Dreaming of Trees I & II, where Andrén depicts a person dreaming under an oak leaf, seemingly dreaming of the other painting, where a man slowly turns into an animal inside an all-devouring dark forest. The blend between what is dream and what is real is becoming visible in her painting Tongue ear eye, Uterus spine prostate leg, Stomach arm where the spectator is confronted with an illusion of a seemingly ordinary ear, but if we take a closer look, more and more elements appear. Our mind is trying to make sense of the illusion created by colors and shapes. In her painting The Trick, Andrén depicts two floating gloves, reminding us of illustrations describing how to perform magic tricks. The disconnected hands communicate silently through signs which they communicate with us in a voiceless language. Andrén’s two drawings Untitled Drawings I & II come from a series of on-going work titled "Do you like the dust we breathe". They are based on visual slides to educate hospitalized children inside a Bulgarian hospital. The drawings remind the spectator of anatomy lessons but also colorful marshmallows which could become alive in a dream. Minda Andrén attempts within her artistic practice to depict memories of images that linger in endless loops through her mind rather than painting an accurate representation of what is understood as reality. The source of these very subjective impressions of reality can be the immediate surroundings encountered by Andrén, books, medieval manuscripts or what the mind feeds off from by scrolling through the endless stream of digital images. Andrén’s artistic practice negotiates the position of painting within the flood of (digital) images, using hybrid elements by which she enables us to navigate through academic aesthetics, historic art and the digital world. An exploration of the aftereffects of a bodily sensation from a constant flow and overload of images. Which images stay in the minds aether, what colors blend together and who disappears forever?