Magnus Wallin
Assembly
The themes in Magnus Wallin’s work straddle the epic saga of the human body through the history of art and human history itself up to the modern epoch. From anatomy and medicine, through to torture and suffering, religious rapture and ecstasy, the body is addressed as the site of sciences and pseudo-sciences.
Wallin’s sculptures suggest physical application; they appear to be functional, or perhaps once were. Through his practice Wallin not only depicts but employs the human body, both literally and in abstraction, to reveal its iconic and fluid position in the realm of social, political and historical relations. Many of the objects are disquieting in character - sometimes startlingly direct to the point of aggressive, however his work is enriched with a quality of the absurd and pervasive humor.
The exhibition presents a group of sculptures which are in some cases installational, as in the inert monolithic blood-red body of Cylinder, or the fraught and historically-charged work Stock, in which a residue of human hair is trapped between the wall and timeworn shower nozzles. Other objects are precisely arranged: in Glossy two white mottled aluminium rings, like Hula-hoops wrapped in bandages, suggest props from a Leni Riefenstahl film.
In addition to the sculptural works Wallin presents his most recent black and white animated film, Elements. Wallin invokes Dante’s Second Circle of Hell, reserved for those overcome by lust, with an assembly of body parts and skeletal fragments in a stormy firmament. As elements of the bodies conjoin - here to make half figures, there to make horse-like creatures - the masses align themselves into a diabolical rotating carrousel in an outlandish version of community.
Magnus Wallin (1965) lives and works in Malmö. He is educated at Valand and Kgl. Danske Kunstakademi in Copenhagen. Wallin has shown in Plateau of Mankind, 49 Biennale di Venezia, Venice, the 7th International Istanbul Biennial, Des Moines Art Center, USA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin and Stockholm, Kunsthalle Wien, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Millesgården, Stockholm and Gothenburg Museum of Art.
