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Pressure/Imprint

Malmö Konsthall 30 September – 28 January

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Charlotte Johannesson from textile to a digital format. Like computer was no strict reason to send art through the
and Ester Fleckner outwardly have nothing graphics, a woven tapestry consists of ‘pixels’, is mail and, for this connoisseur of the genre,
to do with one another: they’re from different constructed numerically and is made on a screen no reason to make art at all.
eras, making divergent work in unrelated media. (albeit a different kind). Featuring hard-and-fast Wolf-Rehfeldt’s work allows us to see
Yet here they are, presented under the title eponymous messages like Drop Dead (1977) and language as graphics, simply as different uses
Pressure/Imprint, at once distinct and entangled. I’m No Angel (1974), Johannesson’s large tapestries of straight and bent lines. When things are
A loose arrangement of temporary walls divides appear as iconic forerunners of an aesthetic broken down, we begin to realise how they
the wide-open space of Malmö Konsthall into and a type of communication that, a decade on might be reassembled differently. How letter
chapters reserved for each artist, but chapters from their making, would have migrated to the A’s might make the roof of a building, as in
large enough to remain porous at their edges, digital realm and become ubiquitous. Concrete Architecture (1980), or how, in Ester
each allowing sightlines to the other two. The When Johannesson started working with Fleckner’s Clit-dick Register, 1–22 (2013–4), a clit
exhibition architecture is a manifestation of the the Apple II computer, subversion and experi- and a dick both look like a U, and a U, too, proves
borders that also separate the three women in mentation were synonymous: there simply was manifold. In Fleckner’s woodcuts trial, and
life, the artists being born respectively in 1932, not enough precedence for proper usage to have especially error, are key. Although reminiscent
1943 and 1983 in the former East Germany, been established. In a similar way, Ruth Wolf- of blueprints or instruction manuals, the strange
Sweden and Denmark. Johannesson, during Rehfeldt pushed her medium, the typewriter, figures flaunt their irregularity as if adamantly
the 70s, was one of the first artists in Scandinavia to its limits, but for different reasons. With resisting completion. Woodcutting was invented
to work with nascent computer technology, restrictions on exhibition and movement for to reproduce, but Fleckner uses this method
while Fleckner aligns herself with a tradition of artists in the GDR, Wolf-Rehfeldt participated because it doesn’t, or not precisely anyway.
woodcuts dating back to the fourteenth century. in the widespread artistic exchange across the As with Johannesson and Wolf-Rehfeldt, her
Yes, difference abounds in this show. And yet it is Iron Curtain through mail. In what must have subversive use of technology challenges
transcended as easily as stepping over a doorsill. been an immensely laborious process, she made normativity and attempts to form alternative
As revealed here, one of many points of intricate patterns using only letters and spaces: connections between things. The series of
contact across their positions is the meeting one diamond shape reads Limits Endlessness woodcuts A closet does not connect under the bed,
between the manual and the technological. (1975); another, undated, Aufbruchstimmung. 1–20 (2016) shows disassembled closet parts,
Or rather, the ways in which that’s a false binary, The latter roughly translates to ‘a sense that some- one with ironic instructions to ‘build and
the two existing in constant oscillation. Working thing is going to change’, a sentiment actively seduce’ pencilled in above. This would be a
together with the computer engineer Sten at play in Wolf-Rehfeldt’s wildly experimental normative approach to exhibition-making.
Kallin, Johannesson and her husband, Sture, output long before it materialised politically The one that spawned Pressure/Imprint, thank-
built their own software to translate images in 1990. Following this turn of events, there fully, is not. Kristian Vistrup Madsen

Charlotte Johannesson, Computer Graphics, 1983.
Courtesy the artist and MalmÖ Konsthall

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