Matts Leiderstam: Stockholm
We are delighted to open the season with Matts Leiderstam’s fifth solo-exhibition at the gallery.
In the beginning of his career in the late 1980’s, Leiderstam worked mostly with painting, often based on photographic material, for instance from gay porn movies or medical illustrations. In the early 1990s his work become more political and in exhibitions such as The Shepherds his attention expanded to landscape and the park as gay cruising grounds. This parallel gaze was later applied to art history and theory and more specifically to the museum as space. Using multiple vantage points and interpretations models as well as exploring the relationship between the original and the copy, for instance in the extensive touring exhibition project Grand Tour he challenged the patriarchal gaze that has dominated art history.
Leiderstam was one of the first artists in Sweden to do practice based doctoral studies and he graduated with a PhD in 2006. He has since then been working foremost with photography, installation and text in relation to the genres of landscape and portraiture, always with the underlying theme of painting and the gaze. The point of departure remains his personal viewing experiences of historical paintings. Research and archival work concerning these paintings often result in complex works spanning long periods of time and where Leiderstam lets the methods and practices of the artist and the art historian influence inform one another.
In this exhibition the personal history of the artist is interwoven with the modalities of art historic research. A key work is Reconstruction, 1988-2016, based on two paintings made by the artist in 1988-89, that he bought back at auction in the spring of 2016. Through the auction house he got in touch with the seller and in his private archive he found the photograph on which one of the paintings was based on. Contemporary history and personal trajectory are reflected in the work’s both genesis and provenance. Matts Leiderstam is born in 1956 and lives and works in Stockholm and Malmö.
His career is international and his works are to be found in important public and private collections around the world. In the past year he has been shown at Collectors’ Space, Istanbul, The National Gallery, Prague, Fondazione Prada, Milano as well as at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo and Magasin III Stockholm. Until August 28 his work can be seen in the exhibition Nature Morte at Bohusläns Museum, Uddevalla.
