Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Precious us (installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2023. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Press release, August 2023
Matteo Cantarella is pleased to present Precious us, a solo exhibition of works by Danish artist Frederikke Jul Vedelsby. The exhibition marks Vedelsby’s second solo show at the gallery, and comprises an installation of drawings, stills, 16mm film and digital recordings that reflect Vedelsby’s effort to articulate non verbal and alternative forms of sensorial connections into our systems of understanding. The exhibition is accompanied by A Cloud Above a Show, a text composed for Frederikke Jul Vedelsby by Madrid-based artist researcher, Rebecca Collins.
Working across drawing, time-based media and writing, the work of Frederikke Jul Vedelsby examines access to other states of consciousness. Under the title of drawing, which Vedelsby precisely entrusts to each work, lies a daily, physical and spiritual practice. Both decidedly ritualized and extremely physical, shapes in Vedelsby’s work are irregular, quirky, and amply magnetizing – bodiless, and elusive entities occupying an earthly domain where feelings are estranged by over-mediated forms of connections. Stemming from an urgency to create spaces for empathy and contact, her drawing practice is a suturing experience where Vedelsby attempts to reorganize firsthand feelings and impulses which are inscribed within her own bodily perception. For her, drawing is a complex visualization of a non-verbal process of knowledge: an articulation of her relationship with the surroundings – means, not an end, to sense herself and others in relations to circumstances.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Precious us (installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2023. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, You say Precious, Cave says us (Drawing), 2023 (beeswax, oil and pigment on woven paper, 48.0 x 54.0 cm). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, You say Precious, Cave says us (Drawing), 2023 (beeswax, oil and pigment on woven paper, 33.5 x 34.5 cm). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Precious us (installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2023. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Precious us (installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2023. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Precious us (Drawing), 2023 (beeswax, oil and pigment on woven paper, 82.5 x 84.0 cm). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Precious us (installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2023. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Precious us (Drawing), 2023 (beeswax, oil and pigment on woven paper, 82.5 x 84.0 cm). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Tell me everything (Alba acting grandmother), 2023 (digital recording and 16mm film transferred to video, 05:00 min, loop). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
With 16mm film, Vedelsby seeks to trail personal rituals of awareness traced in situations, dialogues and emotional states arising from experiences of connection with other people. Her preoccupation stems from an inherent desire to overcome the idea of a predetermined model of sociability, which too often comes to define the trajectory of our social and affective engagement. In the digital recording Tell Me Everything (Alba acting grandmother), 2023 Vedelsby returns to film fellow artist Alba Enstrøm. Here, Alba is instructed to play the role of a grandmother – a fictional portrayal that is developed together with Vedelsby. Engaging with the co-creation of a fictional event, Vedelsby seeks to release a stratum of distinct energy within that very instant and situation. As an opposition to a society conventionally ruled by one-directionality, and effectivity, Vedelsby poses such rituals as an expression of consciousness, bringing awareness to those images which are sensorially formed and stay within our somatic and spiritual perceptivity. As such, her work conjures great tensions and contradictions which are not there to be answered nor revealed but simply let to exist, in the ways that we allow them to be – beyond words.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Precious us (installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2023. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Tell me everything (Grandmother), 2023 (digital screenshot, 41.0 x 51.0 x 2.0 cm). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Tell me everything (Grandmother), 2023 (digital screenshot, 41.0 x 51.0 x 2.0 cm). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Precious us (installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2023. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby (b. 1990, in Copenhagen, DK) is a Danish artist living and working between Athens, Greece and Copenhagen, Denmark. Vedelsby graduated with an MFA from the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden (2020), studied at the Maumaus Independent Study Programme, Portugal (2021), and specialized in critical writing at Biskops Arnö, Sweden (2022). Recent residencies at Materia Abierta (Mexico), DIA (Greece), Can Serrat (Spain), and LungA (Iceland). Vedelsby has been exhibited at Kunsthal Kongegaarden (Kørsor, DK), Malmö Konsthall (Sweden), Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (Copenhagen, DK), Heima (Iceland) and at The Beat Museum (San Francisco, US) among others.
Frederikke Jul Vedelsby, Precious us (installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2023. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen.
Exhibition period: 18th of August - 30th of September, 2023.
More info: www.matteocantarella.net
With contributions by Rebecca Collins, Lisen Pousette and Oskar Persson. The artist would like to give a special thanks to A lba Enstrøm, Σπιτι, I K and Suzanna for participating in the work.