Jakob Kolding

In the lovingly crafted collages by Jakob Kolding, the artist mixes his trademark visual vocabulary of modernist art and architecture, sociology phrases and characters from electronic music, comics and football. All these things seem to have overlapped in Koldings own upbringing in a suburb of Copenhagen and now form the ingredients of an ongoing work in progress. Kolding approaches the question of what happens when we let architecture structure our lives from a multitude of different angles. An idiosyncratic "Koldingesque" cityscape arises out of the mix, where one senses the artist’s own fascination and scepticism with the modernist utopias. In this urban space, art and architecture are often invaded, by people and phenomena that weren’t at all planned to exist there. One such figure is the skater who takes liberties with for example a minimalist sculpture by using it as a skateboard ramp.

In his collages he uncovers underlying ideas and attitudes behind our built environments and makes unexpected connections between popular culture and architecture in an effortless fusion of aesthetics and politics. In spite of his misgivings about settled life in the suburbs as envisioned by city planners, the artist betrays a clear preference for the spare design ideals of 60's and 70's architecture. A taste that recurs in the artist's interest in the formal analogies between the repetitious beats of electronic music, modernist architecture and the paired down aesthetics of minimalist sculpture

Jakob Kolding was born in Albertslund, Denmark in 1971. He studied sociology at Roskilde University and later went on to study art at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

- Marabou Park Annex

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"Future," 2005, mixed media on paper, (27.75 x 39.25 inches), through Team Gallery.