- Venue
- Glitter Ball showroom & projects
- Starts
- Saturday, March 14, 2020
- Ends
- Sunday, March 29, 2020
- Address
- Kyrkogatan 1a 745 31 Enköping
- Location
- Sweden
- Organiser
- Glitter Ball showroom & projects
Vernissage: Saturday 14 March 12 – 3pm
All welcome
For this exhibition Roberto Ekholm brings new sculptural works to the Glitter Ball project space to turn it into a sculptural landscape reminiscent of a holistic space. Barbell weights, resistance bands, and exercise balls are relieved of functionality in this new context but tied to a performative notion. They recall minimalist aesthetics where material, colour and textures gain a meditative power as well as a sense of tension and a sexual subtext. Working with ready-made and fabrication, as well as casting and painting, a new set of meanings are produced for these objects. The exhibition pushes Ekholm’s practice into new developments: his performance background is explored in his choice of material and sculptural compositions, and alongside this his use of colour and textures has a painterly quality. His new work encourages us to linger on the details and wonder how they inform us about our relation to materials and the space they occupy.
These works originate from Ekholm’s ongoing fascination with the body, gym equipment, interior spaces of healing, exercises and the cultural production of fears and desire of survival. Inherent in Ekholm’s work is the interplay between the body, identity, and social structures. An absurd healing trend often leads his research to ancient beliefs around healing, to aesthetics of a trendy gym interior, to the colours in an El Greco painting. He cherry-picks across history to find references that combine to tell us something about our identity and beliefs, for instance combining a Grindr username with the traditional name of the paint colour he has used.
The exhibition’s humorous title draws on two very different cultural references: the first an internet meme that reimagines Pilates balls as gum bubbles for the person sat upon them, the other to Dosso Dossi’s Allegory of Fortune. Ekholm’s use of colour and texture in the works evokes our desire for the apparatus of fitness and the fitness aesthetic. His compositions, however, convey the humorous absurdity of buying into projected ideals of fitness and healing trends, what he calls “commodity of survival”.
For further information please visit www.glitterball.se
