Artists

Ester Fleckner

Press release

Avlskarl Gallery is proud to present Ester Fleckner’s third solo exhibition in the gallery under the title From one to many, many to many, and between two.

From one to many, many to many, and between two takes off where the artist’s last exhibition in the gallery ended in 2020. Here, Fleckner presented the works Woodbeds, brimming, a series of smaller woodcuts based on geometry. In From one to many, many to many, and between two Fleckner exhibits seven new works based on these, but re-performed in a format that takes the series to completely new places.

The title From one to many, many to many, and between two points to the artist’s material and formal investigations of repetition, seriality and deviations. Fleckner works with the woodcut in a minimalist style, in which the same figures appear in linear sequences that are repeated again and again down the paper. During the hand’s work with the cut, the figures slowly change, and small shifts and interactions create a tactile variation in the otherwise uniform graphics.

Woodbeds, brimming is initially read as a text with a clear direction from left to right. The geometric signs – triangles and pentagons, respectively – resemble a kind of abstract, yet alien language, but a language which is open, poetic and without any immediate semantic references. Rather, they point to rhythms and shifts in the open field that lies between the sign system and the body, between the industrial printing process and manual labor, and between the tight geometry that surrounds us in architecture and linguistics and the body’s reluctance to submit to binary frames.

In the new version of Woodbeds, brimming, Ester Fleckner pushes the format to it’s limit. The enormous scale of the series is the largest possible which the artist’s body can span and that the printing press can accommodate. Where the series previously referred clearly to text, this shift in scale makes the new works take on a different and more corporeal character. They resemble woven ultramarine blue carpets – or a kind of beds, as the title seems to suggest.

If Woodbeds, brimming points back to the artist’s previous exhibition, the exhibition’s second series of works draws a line to Ester Fleckner’s current artistic interest. For a series of silver-colored works entitled Bedfellows, Fleckner draws inspiration from eco-critic Timothy Morton’s concept of queer ecology, which refers to the state of perpetual becoming and emergence of new forms that characterizes nature.

In Bedfellows, a leaf shape is repeated and varied across a series, printed on the same plate. Between each print, new forms are added, some in continuation of, while others across existing forms, which gives the series a touch of the momentum and changeability we find in nature, where species are constantly on their way to becoming something new in the encounter with each other. The works thus examine an idea of nature, which is not a static entity of fixed categories, but rather a fluid, desiring and creative negotiation in constant flux.

Ester Fleckner (b. 1983) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2013. Fleckner has previously had solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Freiburg, M100, Kunstplass Contemporary Art, Malmö Kunsthal, Galerie Barbara Wien and at Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst. In 2024, the monograph Ester Fleckner: I navigate in collisions was published by Mousse Magazine and Publishing.