Matias Faldbakken

As an artist, Matias Faldbakken came to international prominence with his disconcerting, direct and provocative position, and as a writer, he also made a name for himself as an enfant terrible with his “Scandinavian Misanthropy” trilogy. His art is based on an engagement with social norms in which he approaches popular culture with gestures that combine refusal and destruction with productive forms of chaos and vandalism. Faldbakken’s practice creates a constant tension within the forces of proposition and cancellation, aesthetic generosity and conceptual restraint, the possibility of language and its abstraction into illegibility. With a controlled aggression he tackles our comfortable notions about art. Various containers are subject to manipulations and often rendered useless; stacked, crushed, flattened, painted, cut, bringing them closer to the social hollowness in which they occur.

Faldbakken’s heterogeneous work is characterized by his cross-media praxis. He often uses media and products that grow out of popular culture and have a shaping influence on systems of social order, employing them both as conceptual starting point and artistic tool. While he uses everyday materials such as newspapers, television, the Internet, as well as spray paint, adhesive tape, and marker pens, language and literature also repeatedly play a central role in his work. The artworks cultivate an attitude that subtly addresses doubts over whether any form of refusal can still exist without being immediately popularised. Thus, his art deals with the definition, transformation, and interaction of the normative and the marginal.