Eva Dixon and Benedikte Klüver: LANDS END
12th April, 2024 – 13th April, 2024
MAMA
10 Greatorex Street
London
E1 5NF
MAMA is proud to present LANDS END, a duo exhibition with Eva Dixon and Benedikte Klüver. The exhibition brings together a pairing who are both totally fixated on world-building fictional universes and maps inspired by their own personal histories, and the legacy of their mediums.
Working in both large scale oil paintings and refined geometric tapestries, Klüver’s dramatic hues harmonise and clash in repetitive horizons across her works. ‘I believe colours have different temperaments, but it’s how they’re placed and how they border each other that can activate a map for the eye,’ she explains, beaming with every mention of her colour exploration.
vinyl, fabric and spray paint on stretcher, 40 x 65 cm.
© Image Courtesy of MAMA and the Artist
She credits a family home filled with colour and for this impulse to create with such bold tones: ‘if something could be red, it would be red. The toaster, the phone, the couch, plates, glasses. That made an imprint on me.’ Her trip to Japan in winter similarly informed her crisp and saturated colour palette, where the bright natural light and bold architecture created firm patterns of saturated hues that contrasted so starkly to the Scandinavian ‘grey soup’ winters of her childhood.
Dixon also nods to her personal history for the evolution of her practice. Taking her cues from the textures and techniques of her early memories, Dixon’s work is infused with a family in trucking, mining and construction. Her lineage in labour meant invention and creation felt inevitable. Working in found materials and objects that often ‘end’ up on the ‘land’, Dixon scavenges for treasure and engineers them for a new life: ‘The development of my practice has been the rejection of what I thought my work had to be, and the pursuit of what I enjoy making and what I found difficult to make.’
© Image Courtesy of MAMA and the Artist
Like Dixon, Klüver openly receives inherited processes and mediums whilst also allowing herself to play with them to find her own unique expressive language. She acknowledges the deeply female process of needlepoint, repeated and performed in precise gesture, throughout history. But she’s more interested in creation than decoration, revelling in the weight the piece gains as she stitches: ‘It makes it feel alive, like a little growing creature of colour relations.’
By inheriting ancient or ancestral practises and materials whilst also subverting tradition and expectation, both artists enter into a kind of invention zone. Klüver is imagining a future, mapped out in colour. Dixon is imagining a past that never existed. She carves out work that isn’t nostalgic, nor explicitly autobiographical, but omnipresent and urgent. Whilst innately imbued with her own personal history of making, her pieces are representative of a time that never happened, like heirlooms from a fictional universe.
Artefacts of both everything and nothing at all. ‘It’s a culmination of communities that don’t necessarily exist,’ explains Dixon.
Both Dixon and Klüver’s creations are born out of rough hands and busy minds that soak up their surroundings and use materials enriched with history and legacy to invent new artefacts. For Klüver, the slow, meditative needle action is cut against the immediacy of colour in her thread. In tapestry, the colours are instant, non-negotiable, the needle formidable and firm. In contrast, her gestural and expressive oil paintings are quick in form, but slow in colour, where shades, dynamics and relationships are built and rebuilt over time. Whatever the medium, the colourful webs mean the reader’s eye is ‘always on the move.’
© Image Courtesy of MAMA and the Artist
Dixon’s practice is similarly mixed in pace, where quick collages of found objects provide immediate satisfaction, and slow and ‘over-engineered’ structures take time and meticulousness. ‘It’s fascinating to find an object in the digital space and then to find it again in the world when it arrives at my doorstep,’ she explains.
Blurred photos and poorly listed eBay finds provide the artist with a thrill of rediscovery and reimagining, where obfuscation provides some relief from reality and allows her to use materials outside of their community.
‘When I’m in the studio I don’t think of myself as an artist. The work is asking me questions and I’m responding to it. I have to do it. I don’t think I’m guiding the work. The things I make lead me onto the next piece,’ says Dixon. ‘I can’t see myself doing anything else,’ says Klüver. ‘The work must go out into the world.’
Eva Dixon and Benedikte Klüver: LANDS END opens on the 12th of April, 2024 until the 13th of April, 2024 at MAMA
©2024 MAMA
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