HELENA LUND EK – CRACK AN EGG

13.10.18 – 24.11.18

Presented by MEGA at Tegel. October 13 – November 24, 2018. Exhibition open every Saturday between 2-5 PM and by appointment until November 24. Contact: info@mega-foundation.com. Tegel is a new contemporary art space in Stockholm. The venue is shared by MEGA (Maria Elena Guerra Aredal) och yek (Asrin Haidari), who produces both joint and individual exhibitions and projects. With support from Stockholms Stad and Kulturrådet.

Sorrow depends on strength to exist; mourning is a fist fight, tears seize energy, melancholy is resolute. But when agony circumvents rationality and encamps flesh, muscles, veins, organs, how do we instruct the body to withstand?

MEGA Foundation is proud to present Helena Lund Ek’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Crack an Egg is an intimate exploration of separation within oneself. As an isolated action merely apolitical and individual, yet a source of controversy and bloodshed due to history and context. Focused around the I and the body as well as personal grief and endurance, the works are based on Lund Ek’s own emotional and physical experience.

The scale of the sculptures and paintings varies from the miniature to the massive, while material, technique and motif creates inseparable contradictions. The picture of a pink peony rising from a silver colored gym weight is composed of expressive strokes in wall paint, water-color and oil on canvas. Attached to the composition is a raw, abstract clay sculpture seemingly writhing in pain. The image of an austere woman situated in a mundane home setting with a runny fried egg in her hand — sunny side up — is in direct dialogue with the usage of egg tempera on roughly textured sand-gesso. Colorful geraniums in bloom are keeping her company. Glazed ceramic boxing gloves in shiny red are resting on sturdy concrete stone. Their finish is irregular, as if fashioned by a trembling hand. Monumental, standing rectangular paintings are balancing on disproportionately small dumbbells and clenched fists in plaster. Both abstract and corporeal in expression, the work reflects how physicality and identity, though not naturally coherent, inevitably affect each other.

Crack an Egg is ultimately portraying the dichotomy of being in control of and at the same time controlled by the body, and its consequential vulnerability and forcefulness. It’s a depiction of gratitude and involuntary guilt presented in a space for feeling or not feeling while observing embodied emotion.
– Lo Hallén

Helena Lund Ek (b. 1988) is a mixed media artist based in Stockholm. She works with figurative painting, representative sculpture and a conjunction of both. Often site-specific, the works spans large scale collages in textile, applications and paint and small tempera and oil paintings with focus a on the symbolic use of method and material. The practice always involves a fusion of the literal, the bodily, the metaphorical and the spiritual. Lund Ek graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts Oslo in 2014.

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HELENA LUND EK – CRACK AN EGG

Individual works