FREDERIK NYSTRUP-LARSEN + OLIVER SUNDQVIST

Working separately or together, Frederik Nystrup-Larsen and Oliver Sundqvist are two Danish artists, with individual practices who create wondrous works of art in unison treating complex materials with dignity and innovative creativity. Marked by their own time, they cross boundaries between various media: installations, sculpture, interior design and recycled objects. Their Soft Boxing series, renders Tai Chi’s aesthetic movements into a sculptural legacy, bending and breaking the definition of sculpture as form, spatial relations, volume, line, colour, texture. “Soft Boxing is motion arrested in time.” A meticulously phenomenological exploration of the gradual transition of flowing movements, one after another. Connoting Tai Chi’s poetic charm and fundamental Yin/Yang-duality, each sculpture consists of a skeleton of bent steel strings, determining the object’s biomorphic form – reviving the 1950s idiom of organic design – stretched by a seamless coated acrylic-knitted tube, swung in a direction, a gesture, a command. “We are confronted with these anthropomorphic shapes, quite physically, before they catch our eyes as shadows of the previous and the following luminescent creature, some dangle from the ceiling, other balance or sit on fragile legs, resembling a butterfly chrysalis or a praying mantis. Light, immaterial and weightless, they have the potential to carry evocative power.”

For Ark Kollekt 01, they present three sculptural lights from their Soft Boxing Series, made of stainless steel, coated acrylic knit and LED pipes.

Portrait by Simon Knudsen