Ulrik Heltoft
PRESS RELEASE
Kirkhoff is proud to present the solo exhibition ”The Open Door” with
the Danish artist Ulrik Heltoft. The exhibition period is April 30th -
June 17th 2005.
Heltoft presents video, photography, object and slide projection. The
slide projection is a result of a ’cooperation’ between Heltoft and the
American artist Miljohn Ruperto. Heltoft has asked Ruperto to give him
an instruction for a new piece. Ruperto instructed him to show a card
dealer, throwing one card at a time towards a camera, creating a
three-dimensional effect. Like in ”The Five Obstructions”, the
exchanges are based on the two artists’ knowledge of each other’s
practice but the result is no less unpredictable. It contains evitably
misunderstandings when Ruperto ”translates” Heltoft’s practice to an
idea and when Heltoft ”translates” Ruperto’s indications to a final
piece. The piece also deals with the process of communication which
always forms the basis for the production of an art work.
Heltoft investigates different media’s technical functions and
expressions in his pieces and characteristic of them are references to
and use of each other’s media specificity. One by one the two slide
machines project onto the same screen, merging the images into each
other and thereby resembling a video projection, the video ”The Open
Door” has photographic character, and the photograph of a glove is
really an X-ray picture. The spatial dimension in the presentation of
the works is sculptural, as is the case with ”The Open Door” where the
image is projected onto an object, repeting the projector’s cone of
light. In this way, the object and projection mime each other’s shape
and together they form a perfect figure.
Heltoft’s works typically deal with subtle, ignored details and
coincidences, presented in an absolute and simple, yet abstract
universe. The video ”Ghost Town” is filmed from the artist’s pocket in
an abadoned mining town in Death Valley. Two figures appear vaguely,
but they are blurred and intangible in both shape and speach. Heltoft’s
pieces show banal paradoxes and small grotesque situations, where you
loose your sense of what is up or down, construction or coincidence.
Ulrik Heltoft is educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts and at
Yale University School of Art, where he later has taught. Heltoft has
recently exhibited at the gallery Murray Guy in New York and will later
this year show in Baltimore.
The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Council.
