Galleri Nicolai Wallner is pleased to present News, an exhibition by Julie Falk. The exhibition marks Falk’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
In News, Falk presents new sculptural works that employ acts of repeating, maintaining, and preserving, investigating systems of value, attention, production and labour. Working with materials that have already served their original purpose, Falk considers the cycles that shape our environments – what is used up, left behind, or deemed obsolete.
A series of discarded paper tubes, originally used to hold the explosive materials for large fireworks, are repositioned. These sculptures undergo a subtle process of transformation. Exposed to elements outside the artist’s studio, they decline over time. Later, they are reinforced, lacquered, and painted. The function they represent – to contain and give way to spectacle and celebration – is expended. What remains is the hollow form, emptied of purpose, now gathered around the gallery.
The exhibition continues with two new works which continue Falk’s exploration of transformation and recontextualization. Traces from previous work, reassembled materials, and objects once intended for other uses are now reassembled into new expressions. Together, these pieces form a constellation of gestures that ask what it means for something to persist, to shift, or to fall away.
Each new work in Falk’s oeuvre is linked to the last, connected in chains of iteration – endlessly reusing and repairing, or allowing an objects’ eventual decay to become central to the work. These unbound, recursive processes become a way of thinking through and bending systems – not just of artistic and industrial production, but also of memory and value. The artist employs a lean manual approach in order to inspect society’s expectations for visibility and acceleration. In doing so, Falk invites the audience to reconsider how worth is assigned to objects, to labour, and to time.
There are three pieces of News
A vitrine and four large cornice hooks echo the logic of exhibiting, to which their contents partially submits:
Titles formally known as Everything Evaporate are subtracted to initials.
E.E. are six cardboard tubes sculpted by outside circumstances and time spent away from making:
E.E 0093
E.E 210
E.E 0007
E.E 017
E.E 5565
E.E 0001
(Grey is the material civilisation is covered by)
New is a stack of works that are no longer artworks. Once considered for a magazine cover, they sat in a basement and, more recently, in a vitrine.
Free is a consumed dress sliced in two, resting on the floor. Utilizing itself, the two parts exist side by side, with the absence of the other.
J.F
