Kvltvrgeist Remaster

An exhibition of public artworks

'The city itself is the anonymous and multiple
author of the images collected and exhibited as artworks’

– Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, 2002.

These large-scale banner artworks are created in direct response to the decoration found around the streets of Helsinki. In public space, diverse tableaux are created by multiple authors using posters, stickers and graffiti. Particular spaces in the city are appropriated as informal message boards, where agendas are promoted and discourses negotiated. Often, these take place on the housings for electrical junction boxes, municipal signs or building hoardings. These examples are highly aesthetic, organised within regularly shaped areas that perform the function of the canvas painting support in delineating the composition and balancing the dynamic, even chaotic, styles at play within formal edges.

In response, Tom Cardwell has created a series of detailed paintings that follow the style of ‘quodlibet’ still life paintings popular in the Dutch Golden Age. Elements from Helsinki’s streets are carefully transcribed and recontextualised within paintings that are dense with coded symbolism and evocative imagery. Here, the painted elements are juxtaposed in larger digital compositions used to create exterior fabric banners. In this way, the source imagery is returned to its urban context on the streets of the city.

• Organisation
• Author