Nanna Riis Andersen

You hide it so well

Duo with Nils Elvebakk Skalegård
Sirin Gallery
2020

‘You wear it so well’ is the title of a song by Lou Reed. At one point in the song, Reed’s lyric ‘You wear it so well’ is replaced by ‘You hide it so well’ thereby shifting the positive tone of the lyrics to something more disconcerting; It turns out that the base of this lyric has a twist.

In this exhibition the works of Nils Elvebakk Skalegård are facing Nanna Riis Andersen's ink paintings which follow the theme of timeless forms presented in an organic aesthetic space. The fragmented body appears as a recurring element within the works, and often the body's inner, hidden universe is an early departure point. Riis Andersen abstracts her work through various stages of resistance and dissolution where the living body appears as a primordial form under constant becoming.

Common to all the works is that they fantasize about a type of primal future that hides the bleed between the hard and the soft; dwellings that crumble, bodies that amass in the folds of the house. An exoskeleton of soft tissues and assistive accessories encase our bodies; sheltering and participating in a bodily economy. Hard and soft substances that seep and disappear, escape and slip in, out and over us like water.  Holes where money slips through from one account to another, covering the floor, plugging holes, deeper than themselves, in the body's internal cavities that suck the rims of holes. The last material becomes the first. In a cycle of chalk creatures, biological cells, single-celled organisms, exoskeletons, radiation, sound waves and thoughts as a shared consciousness and common objective, in a search for the basic formation of life.

… And your face hides it, so we can not tell, That you knew, we would wear it so well, You wear it so well…
… And all of the pain, that you used to tell, You hide it so well, Can't tell from your face that you knew it so well…
- Lou Reed

Photo: David Stjernholm