Roberto Ekholm works with myth and identities through his practice which encompasses sculpture, photography, drawing and performance. By using information found in resourced text from newspapers, online sources and medical journals, he create characters both in sculptures and in performative photographs. Through the expression of citation, fragmentation and staging; Ekholm creates portraits of unnerving depth and ambiguous narrative.
Ekholm’s visual language is rooted in timeless qualities: archaic skulls, animal drawings and lab glasses. The world of performance he conjures enables variegated images and ideas to become characters in a stage-play realm. Pieces such as Hoody, Death’s Objections and Untitled (The Healer) are borrowed from western painting traditions; the vanitas, Scandinavian folklore and story telling. They refer to historical quasi-medical shamans and by uprooting them from specific ties of time and location, the viewer is given the chance to create new meanings and narrative opportunities.
In the relationship between objects and performances he creates characters which provide a catalyst for fictitious pondering whilst acting as a mirror to the viewer’s own relation to current conditions of identity. Works such as the Magnetic Man, Mr Mosquito and the Mosquito Choir make references to historical characters such as Franz Mesmer or Doktor Schnabel von Rom as well as to modern notions of medicine. Acted as an opera, folklore or through performative photographs; the “stage” becomes free of moralizing and instead extends its saga through open-ended possibilities allowing each spectator to be consumed by their own fiction.
Ekholm constructs his own visual language whilst alluring us to our own reality through the use of familiar references either as architectural spaces, mundane settings or the presence of the body. By blurring the line between the pictorial image, the theatre stage and the sculptural; our desire to define becomes conceptualised and part of the reading of his work.
Ekholm’s visual language is rooted in timeless qualities: archaic skulls, animal drawings and lab glasses. The world of performance he conjures enables variegated images and ideas to become characters in a stage-play realm. Pieces such as Hoody, Death’s Objections and Untitled (The Healer) are borrowed from western painting traditions; the vanitas, Scandinavian folklore and story telling. They refer to historical quasi-medical shamans and by uprooting them from specific ties of time and location, the viewer is given the chance to create new meanings and narrative opportunities.
In the relationship between objects and performances he creates characters which provide a catalyst for fictitious pondering whilst acting as a mirror to the viewer’s own relation to current conditions of identity. Works such as the Magnetic Man, Mr Mosquito and the Mosquito Choir make references to historical characters such as Franz Mesmer or Doktor Schnabel von Rom as well as to modern notions of medicine. Acted as an opera, folklore or through performative photographs; the “stage” becomes free of moralizing and instead extends its saga through open-ended possibilities allowing each spectator to be consumed by their own fiction.
Ekholm constructs his own visual language whilst alluring us to our own reality through the use of familiar references either as architectural spaces, mundane settings or the presence of the body. By blurring the line between the pictorial image, the theatre stage and the sculptural; our desire to define becomes conceptualised and part of the reading of his work.
