Exhibition Details

The German-Icelandic artist duo Veronika Sedlmair and Brynjar Sigurðarson present a series of new works that materialise an uncanny revival of romantic ideas. As if escaped from a German Romanticism painting, where the artist’s role was mediating between the creative and the divine, a series of mushroom-shaped objects are installed on a platform at Galerie Kreo in Paris. Their glossy surfaces and fleeting colours make for a ghostly scene inside the exhibition space. To constitute 'Mystic Garden', the duo Sedlmair and Sigurðarson worked with a skilled glass blowers community to reach the limit that large-scale blown glass can take and that can be handled by a person's lungs within the little time one has to (re)work the hot material. Having similar sizes to our human upper bodies their light-emitting volumes could be interpreted as materialisations of souls, or even characters. Reminiscent of the Romantic movement and their philosophy which referred to the German words 'Körper' and 'Leib'; describing the body you have, and the body you are as complimentary entities. These glass objects also look alike but vary in unique colours and each radiates their aura into space. They toy with our imagination in manifesting household items as beings.
The appreciation of the body has gone up and down throughout history. The revival of the flesh in paintings, sculptures and literature followed after the Dark Ages, a medieval era focussing on the soul and the inner world of a human being rather than on their body and skin. Under the growing influence of social media and touch phones leading to new forms of digital selves, our bodies and how they relate to things have long been the focal point of Sedlmair and Sigurðarson. The duo developed their collaborative practice over the last decade during which politics surrounding natural preservation arose, a more ethical physicality of what we have in our homes is considered, and a period in which we allow space for spirituality in cosmopolitan daily lives. The duo started working together by translating the regional values and folkloric aesthetics from the coastal environment of Iceland into contemporary objects, and nowadays, they use their storytelling powers to react to visual elements found in a peripheral zone of the German Alps, where their studio has been based since 2019. In their latest work at Galerie Kreo, his 'Hermit Sveinsson', a fictional character performing rituals in a river with carefully designed props, seems to meet her breathing and colour therapy skills derived from the forest. Their intertwined interests in past, future and present ways of living lead to a series of soulful objects that borderlines between the natural and the technical.
Switched on and off the works illuminate stacked glass elements showing new gradients and overlapping coloured surfaces that make apparent the translucency of their surfaces. Although having a somewhat technological appearance 'Mystic Garden' objects are hand made during an extensive working period at Cirva, The International Glass and Visual Arts Research Centre in Marseille, France. For 'Mystic Garden' to reach the sensitive form of physical presence and lively characteristics, the artists decided to undertake a research and development period over multiple years to find ways of transforming two volumes of liquid glass into colourful objects. The presented glass volumes have an inner and outer colour and different gradients, merged during the glass blowing process. The colour spectrum it resulted in is best described as fleeting, colours that are captured just before turning into other colours. A sort of supernatural moment that occurs when rainbows just arise or lights travel through a dense pack of trees in the early mornings of fall. The work could easily be mistaken for props from a science fiction movie set, found in the attic of a retired film set maker.