David Zwirner is pleased to present “The Anchor Hits the Sand”, new work by Swedish artist Jockum Nordström (b. 1963) at the gallery’s London location. For this, Nordström’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, the artist will debut a new large-scale immersive environment, which will be installed on the gallery’s first floor. The presentation will also include a range of the artist’s recent drawings and collages.
A new facet of the artist’s practice, Nordström’s spatially and visually immersive environments reimagine the imagery and forms in his collages and drawings within a dynamic sculptural and proto-cinematic tableau. At once intimate, evocative, and meditative, the new environment—the first to be presented in a gallery—will be encountered by viewers through a veil composed of semitransparent paper (in fact, the same paper used to create his collages); behind which cutouts of buildings, trees, and animal and human forms are suspended between the ceiling and floor by rotating wire mobiles that are illuminated by colour wheels, animating the paper’s surface in a whimsical play of light and shadow. The work conjures associations with various traditions of shadow puppetry, practiced by many cultures around the world for millennia, as well as children’s shadow play and contemporary avant-garde theater.
A musical element—a ‘collaged’ composition of found and new sounds recorded in collaboration with the music producer Rudolf Nordström, the artist’s son—lends another dramatic dimension to the overall work. From the ground floor, where the collages and drawings are presented, visitors will be able to hear the musical composition above, further connecting the imagery within the two spaces. Entering the first-floor galleries, audiences will have two ways of experiencing the environment. Proceeding to the front of the space offers a view of the screenlike veil upon which shadow, light, and imagery are projected. Visitors are also encouraged to view the work from the back of the space and observe the materials and mechanics of the enveloping sculptural display. Much like the artist’s collages, where the appearance of imagery is self-evidently linked to the process of their construction, this format lays bare the relationship between the artist’s assembly of his materials and the projections on the paper screen. Taken together, the result, as curator Andrea Andersson notes, is ‘part fantasy, part dream, and entirely analog. It’s a work out of time or place.’