An ironic take on the process of integrating with a different culture is at the heart of an exhibition which opens at a St Albans gallery on Saturday.
Stockholm-based German artists Tobias Hofsäss and Thomas Raschke are putting on the exhibition entitled Great IDEA at the University of Herts Galleries at the Museum of St Albans in Hatfield Road until March 22.
The two men have developed a series of works based on their impressions of the habits, traditions and iconography central to Sweden’s ‘self-mythology’. Raschke’s wire sculptures of ordinary domestic objects are paired with Hofsäss’ ghostly large-format negative photographs of Swedish day-to-day life and displayed alongside some of the furniture and designs considered quintessentially IKEA in response to the clean living, minimalist design, and Nordic
democracy with which Scandinavia is associated.
The IKEA-inspired one-size-fits-all lifestyle chafes against the two German emigres.
UH Galleries’ artistic director Matthew Shaul said: “Thomas and Tobias’ exhibition quite literally presents the world in a way in which we have never seen it, with an intricacy and insight that is both very exciting and totally unfamiliar.”
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