The Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery is pleased to present a new solo exhibition of the artist Anders Clausen.
This year's exhibition is a sequel to his second solo exhibition, 'Nero Tools', which took place at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery in 2009. Anders Clausen was by then already interested in the principles that govern our consumer society. Besides his sculptures, which he constructed from various everyday objects and mass-produced products and presented them on slender pedestals, Clausen exhibited enlargements of German computer magazine covers of the loudest possible design, with headlines in bright bold letters declaiming'Gute Tools, böse Tools", 'Daten retten' or 'Vista geknackt' ('Good Tools, Bad Tools', 'Saving Data','Cracking Vista'), thus pandering directly to the fears of the everyday computer user.
It was on the basis of this presentation that Anders Clausen developed, during the years that followed, an intensive preoccupation with the aesthetic of our computer world and especially with the architecture of the computer desktop. Screenshots of the 'tools" we use so much every day that we are hardly aware of them any more are enlarged to many times their size and cannot now escape our notice. These large-format images, with their clear, technoid language that is so familiar to us from our everyday work on the computer, now appear so unfamiliar. Anders Clausen translates the digital world of the computer into our analogue environment and in so doing questions our customary way of seeing things: the irrevelant is made relevant!
The artist's recently completed works for the current exhibition likewise take a logical look at the tiniest details of our computer applications, especially those of word processing. Error messages, warnings and correction symbols combine into minimalist compositions on huge PVC banners. The hierarchy of this communication is clearly defined: the corrective authority is the computer, which controls our actions with a merciless automatism to which we have totally succumbed. However, in the work entitled 'I would prefer not to',this seemingly unchallengeable authority is called in question. The appropriated words 'I would prefer not to'hark back to Herman Melville's short story Bartleby the Scrivener, written in 1853. The diligent clerk Bartleby one day refuses, with precisely these words and to the astonishment of his employer, all further clerical work. Similarly, the all too dictatorial authority of program software is visualized in Clausen's work through the metamorphosis of a stepped pattern from Word into the silhouette of a B2 Stealth Bomber.
Anders Clausen, born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1978, lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2007. The exhibition at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery in 2007 was this young artist's very first solo exhibition worldwide. Anders Clausen is currently taking part in the group exhibition 'Out of Focus" at the Saatchi Gallery, London.
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