By Phillip Edward Spradley • November 11, 2023 Share —
Lotte Andersen delves into stories and builds worlds based on community, connections, and memories. Andersen is a visual artist born and raised in London and has lately lived and worked between Mexico City and Lima. It is known for its musical engagements, migration stories, and cultural experiences. Artifacts.
Andersen uses photographs of friends, family, and discovered photographs to create rich thematic environments that transfigure a 2D plane. The sculptures, collages, videos, sounds, and performances are an extension not only of Andersen’s multimedia talent, but also of his personality. The works created come from a variety of worlds and confront scenarios while immersing themselves in a multitude of skillfully articulated feelings and sensations.
The intensity of Andersen’s paintings puts the viewer in touch with the ubiquitous connectivity of genuine life and our unknown worlds. Her paintings explore perceptual in-between moments, binaries such as familiar/strange, genuine/artificial, and image/object. Andersen’s paintings use a series of inspiring strategies to delve into themes of ecology, coexistence and intimacy, popular fantasy and colonization.
From 2011 to 2016, Andersen organized and ran MAXILLA, a series of nights out in west London. The party was accompanied by an invitation to collage with discovered photographs and handwritten texts and can be considered the beginning of Andersen’s first steps towards collage and experiments with text, discovered photographs and training.
Andersen has exhibited his paintings at La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Hyundai Card Storage Foundation, Seoul, Korea; David Kordansky, Los Angeles; and recently in Helena Anrather, New York.
Phillip Edward Spradley: Can you tell us about the genesis of your interests and how they have evolved since you left the UK?What do you think the Mexican and South American landscape and your way of running have given you that you couldn’t get being in London?
Lotte Andersen: I feel that my interests are a product of cultural conflicts that occurred when I was growing up in London in the ’90s. . . My father and sister are musicians, my aunt is a photographer and my grandparents are antique dealers, and besides, for my mother, music is at the center of the family dynamic. They took me to museums, auction houses, galleries, and nightclubs, which made my formative years special. My mother had banned television, so I read a lot and started sewing. . . Later, this led me to collaborate organically with them. I also had the amazing opportunity to study or work with other attractive people like John Pearse or Tyrone Lebon or intern with Alexander McQueen and Tom Dixon. An insatiable interest in other people who create things, their inner motivations, and the scenes in which they exist.
I moved to South America in 2019. I was disappointed by Brexit and its implications for the communities in which I lived. It also marked a change in the policy of open borders and movements. I ended up in Lima and then enjoyed and enjoyed the rich before Colombian history, visiting archaeological sites and getting lost in the desert.
Moving to Mexico City broadened those feelings—that is, the tactics by which those spaces have shaped Western art and the tactics by which those connections have been erased. A few weeks ago a Mexican curator and friend came to lunch and we talked about how Pollock was a student of the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros; having attended his experimental workshop in New York, building the important link between Mexican painting and abstract expressionism. I would love to spend some time in Brazil, where the Tropicalia movement emerged in the late 1960s; reflect on the symbiotic relationship between art, music and politics.
In London I found myself fascinated by occasions such as the Notting Hill Carnival, by the Caribbean immigrants who brought with them the culture of the sound system. In this way, I discovered that traveling through my paintings allowed me to think more obviously about the concepts of Migration, rhythm, and movement.
P. E. S. : In your most recent exhibition, Crowds and Crate Diggers, at Helena Anrather’s, you gather sounds and waves of movement and place them into a materialized object with weight and structure. What are some of the demanding situations you face when communicating what has been? Is it described in music as energy, spirit or even vibration in a wrought form that can be understood visually?
L. A. : In my collage practice, I think carefully about the fabrics I use and their inherent ancestral value, as well as their original purpose or function. In Gossip, the fabrics provide their own history of migration, sound and hybridization. The basis of the paintings is a discovered Chicha poster, which I collected in northern Peru. I started collecting those posters while living in Lima with my partner, searching and locating those giant paper objects, fallen from the walls, that were once advertisements for Shisha components. This musical genre emerged after families left the Andes or the Amazon to settle in the urban capital, Lima. This hybrid musical genre materialized as a component of a cultural production created through the youth of those immigrants, who now lived in an urban landscape, creating a colorful and nuanced culture. The concept that rhythm and music can be easily transported in transit prevails in most large-scale migration stories around the world. For example, the cajon, a percussion instrument present in Creole music, has its origins in West African traditions imported during the colonial mission in South America. Shipping boxes, containing tea or other products, were converted into drums.
Gossip, in its materiality, carries as much of the galvanizing quality of those moments of movement and birthday party as it does of the sociopolitical history of a country that is coming. I had a utopian conviction through my expression, whether gathering others to celebrate at MAXILLA or, later, creating dance therapy: that sound and organizational action are valuable and serve to heal communities. In the upper right corner, timbres are embedded along musical notes, fitting into speech marks, bouncing off commas, dancing across the surface, breaking into a dreamlike area. Earlier this year, I worked on a feature at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, with Alonso León-Velarde and composer Max Manzano. We worked on adapting a deconstructed national anthem, written by Alonso and Naima Karlsson last year, which I showed at David Kordansky. The anthem was led by an ensemble of eight brass and percussion instruments, inside the museum’s rotunda. At the time, I was watching Gossip in my studio and looking back, I see that the crescendo of cut-out shapes that occupy the central area of the collage, carries the symbolic quality of a synthetic work performed live. In this way, I try to be inspired by life and try to realize the symphonic quality in everyday life.
P. E. S. : Capturing a culture, an experience, a concept in a tangible form is a big challenge, and you manage to reflexively and effectively locate the invisible, what is difficult to articulate, and make it physical. You paint from a deep well of rich histories, both private and communal, that foster cultural diplomacy. As you read your interests and need to talk more, do you have a fundamental point or study method ready?
L. A. : The name Crowds and Crate Diggers in my exhibition in Helena was an attempt to frame a certain detail of my practice. Like DJs and music lovers, I go through second-hand books and look for discarded paper objects. I love running with uncovered and archival fabrics, such as newspaper prints, because they bring so much sensory excitement to the box digger. I love how the ink fades over time and becomes soft like tissue paper or powder patinas. Spending time in Peru was normal from an archaeological point of view. , as we can simply pass by unmarked sites throughout the country and explore those kinds of landscapes. In the desert, the sun whitens everything and leaves a layer of dust on everything. . .
My work, similar to that of an archivist, is meditative, examining time and interacting with those other threads of time. Working as a tailor also influenced the way I think about how I cut shapes, running with patterns and long-bladed scissors. I see blocks of patterns in the shapes. I leave photographs and photocopiers in my studio infrequently for years, waiting for the right moment to use them. Will it be a headache? Will it be a collage? How do they deserve to be tied or sewn together?metaphorically. I see photographs and newspaper clippings as objects, in the same way I think of sound. These things have dimensionality, once you start to know their history and geopolitical context.
P. E. S. : What becomes popular culture begins in dark, underground, intimate, invitation-only spaces where other people feel safe. I’m thinking about black, queer and punk cultures and how they have provided new styles that are highly celebrated today. However, not once were they popularized through hierarchical sources. His paintings provide the opportunity to expand and put into practice an ambitious vision of storytelling that carries a legacy of creativity and experimentation through colorful imagery, and to make connections locally, nationally and internationally. How do you see your paintings contributing to the verbal exchange around accessibility and engagement?
L. A. : When I started taking portraits, I was interested in creating large-scale video installations. I do not forget my excitement that the sound spread throughout the space. I am so interested in this quality that only sound can fill. in terms of echoic memory and how long the brain can store them. I joke that a painting can’t live in your memory like three bars of a Dua Lipa song at 3am. m. Although I’m still interested in the possibility of turning on a video. With the viewer often striking them inside the paintings, many new concerns arose when I began to live in other places. I started thinking about how temporally my paintings could be made and how much time the viewer had to interact with them.
I think pop music is the most important medium and one of the most flexible of the 21st century. Musicians are like our gods and goddesses, we live out our fantasies through their vocal arrangements. The club will thus be a fertile ground for the emergence of artistic movements, along with fashion and music. It is in this dimly lit uterine area that we cling to our ideologies and decompress. On the Dance Therapy soundtrack, I modeled Adam F’s drum and bass track “Circles,” which was recently modeled by Pink Pantheress on their debut single “Break it Off. “I think when you paint over sampling, there are pauses or specific sounds that have the legacy of marking time and here the artist becomes a selector; dig it up at the right time. Later on the soundtrack, I recorded a clip of Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer of the band Pulp, saying, “I think the natural habitat of music is darkness, most of life’s pleasurable activities take place in the dark.
In this sense, Dance Therapy is an art painting that I have been growing with throughout my travels over the last 7 years. I showed the paintings in a photo series at Casa Encendida (Madrid), in a single-channel presentation at Sheffield Docfest and on a 360-degree screen at the Hyundai Card Foundation (Seoul). I appreciate that a painting can fall apart and take other forms, such as puzzle-like collages, or a hymn that fits a procession. In this way, I hope that my paintings create all those other points; Playing, listening, dancing, observing.
P. E. S. : Music, dance, parties, and networked paintings require participation, as does the delight of art. I think of a slight separation between a player and an art painting, which is a first understanding of what they are interacting with. Can you explain how you understand this divide and how this concept is helping you navigate the art establishment space?
L. A. : I don’t see the player as different when interacting with my paintings. As my practice comes from bringing communities together, I believe there is an inherent social practice in the way my paintings are programmed, which is herbaceous as my practice comes from social spaces. I’ve also had the opportunity to paint in places created for social practice, such as Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects or sound art programming such as The Whitechapel Presents, where I arranged a giant game of musical chairs.
The biggest challenge for my Covid practice is incorporating fitness restrictions and protection into the gallery space. I had yet to do a series of puzzles for a while and was fascinated by the concept of a nuanced set made up of recognizable shapes and symbols. It seemed natural to transfer all the wisdom I had gained from running with other people’s equipment to a more meditative home environment.
P. E. S. : You empower the public to participate in your exhibitions: works like Fortuna, Nancy Noo, and The Messenger, which are wooden collages presented as pieces of a puzzle, allow for a chosen configuration. However, there is a unified way that allows participants to view a portrait of their family circle members. Can you tell us about the cut-out shapes and the meaning of those possible options and the image?How do these models come about?
L. A. : The idea of creating puzzles came from thinking about family constellations and how each of us has our own attitude in the moments we enjoy as an organization. In early 2022, I invited you to create a new series of works curated through Claudia Rankine’s The Racial Imaginary think tank. When thinking about the concepts of nationalism in interpersonal relationships, I narrowed down a list of symbols; an arrow, a comma, a boxing glove, an explosion, a horse chess piece. The symbols that appear on each puzzle serve to illustrate the scenes I provide and have evolved as the organization of the works has expanded. Nancy noo, features a photograph of my little sister taken by my aunt Emily Andersen, the shapes take the form of bath rattles, pacifiers and chew toys. The works can be played like puzzles and fixed in circular frames, reminiscent of Victorian got hereos.
When I first became interested in jigsaw puzzles, I discovered that the first fashionable wooden jigsaw puzzles were made by British cartographer John Spilbury, as an educational device called “desiccated maps. “For us it is vital, given the theme, to adopt this approach of wooden pieces, with a unifying symbol. The resolution to paint with my family’s archive of symbols as a visual shortcut, perhaps a way of coping with the feeling of belonging to a combined heritage. I have a lot of ideas about Enzo Mari, in particular about his animal puzzle, which for me is a turning point in thinking about the perspective of the object.
P. E. S. : From where you were and where you are today in your practice, what was very vital then that you now consider less significant, or anything that once seemed insignificant and now very vital?
L. A. : I think growing up in London, there was a constant rat race that I found to be very distracting. I was interested in building spaces for culture to exist. I think the massive transformation of clubs and social spaces into residential or advertising homes has affected the subculture. I found that living in other cultures where dance is practiced in the streets was revolutionary for me. It is important that sauce exists as a container for the network in a very matrix form.
Existing a bit on the fringes and yet in the midst of an expanding art scene has led to many very meaningful friendships with artists. I see that there is a sense of mutual help in the way I live now, which is positive and generative. Also, having time to do nothing, just be in each other’s studios without interference. In addition, it has been attractive to devote some space to other chapters of my life.
P. E. S. : What are the scenarios and concepts created that you would like to share?
L. A. : Last year, I was living in a 1930s Mexican area, divided into a cluster of apartments that used to house playwrights and other artists. When my wife and I lived there, we shared an area with an organization of young artists. It was an engaging experience to live in an artistic community. In addition, since 2019 I have been organizing essays that I need to compile in a publication that presents a review of this year, among other published works.
I will present two puzzles and project video paintings at the London Gathering opening in early December, as part of an exhibition of the organization curated by Lewis Dalton Gilbert. This will be the first time I’ll be showing puzzles at home, which is fun.
To learn more about Lotte Andersen, follow her on Instagram at @_lotte_andersen, her online page in Lotte-Andersen. com, and check out her painting at the London Gathering in December 2023.
Phillip Edward Spradley
Phillip Edward Spradley is a strategic advisor and program director founded in New York City. Phillip holds degrees in art and art history from Pratt Institute, New York University, and Georgetown University. She works through public programs, institutional partnerships, and networking with a Fine Arts and Fine Arts interpretativas. @phillip_spradley website: phillipedwardspradley. com
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