Project for the Berlin Art Fair by Stalke Galleri

At the Berlin Art Fair in 1997, Stalke Kunsthandel presented an exhibition featuring the two Danish artists Frans Jacobi and Nils Erik Gjerdevik.

For this occasion, Frans Jacobi produced the installation Room 22, a villa tent hand-sewn in dyed transparent silk, monochromatic, with an interior in the same color and accompanied by a soundtrack. The significance of the work was straightforward: the tent indicated impermanence and transit. It functioned as a metaphor for the nomadic existence into which participants—artists, curators, and gallerists—were increasingly drawn by the ever more internationalized art scene. Art fairs in particular expressed a condition of extreme impermanence and transit in which contemporary international art found itself.

Visitors to the fair could enter the tent and from there experience the rest of the fair through a colored, slightly psychedelic light, while the person inside the tent was staged as a kind of psychedelic camping tourist for other visitors. Beyond these social connotations, the work presented itself as a large, colorful, monumental sculpture within the confusing and fragmented landscape of the fair.

Nils Erik Gjerdevik presented, in the same stand, a series of “stripe paintings” (see catalogue), also rendered in a slightly psychedelic color palette. While the meanings in Jacobi’s project were expansive and spatially as well as socially broad, everything in Gjerdevik’s paintings took place within the frame. Small and large narratives dissolved into surprising decorative painterly effects; the painting detached itself from kitschy art references and created new poetic hazes of color—color, and more color.

Jacobi and Gjerdevik had, over a number of years, shared a studio in Berlin. Both artists had exhibited in various contexts in Berlin, but never together. It was therefore both logical and necessary to assemble the two artists in a single stand at the Berlin Art Fair.

Exhibition view from Stalke Out of Space Project #19, Berlin Art Fair 1997, showing works by Frans Jacobi and Nils Erik Gjerdevik. The presentation combined Jacobi’s tent installation with Gjerdevik’s paintings, reflecting the project’s dialogue between spatial and pictorial abstraction.

Frans Jacobi, Everything from a different point of view (room22)

Catalog cover for Various Rehearsals for Good Vibrations by Frans Jacobi and Nils Erik Gjerdevik, publish by Stalke Out Of Space

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