This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.
Exhibition
Ebba Matz: “Journey”
Brother Hjorth’s house, Uppsala. Shown until March 15th
Space is really useless. Mostly empty space, just a few degrees above absolute zero. The images of space are another matter. From six-thousand-year-old Sumerian star maps to the science fiction illustrations of Chris Foss, it is as if the immeasurable dimensions sharpen the ability to create.
Ebba Matz can also be placed somewhere between these reference points. Her “journey” can now be seen in the slightly curved room in Bror Hjorth’s house in Uppsala. The first thing the audience encounters are two tables on which gently rounded, smooth-cut glass objects and mirrors are placed. And yes, it could be a collection of beautiful art glass at Blås och knåda, the arts and crafts collective in Stockholm.
But there’s something about the way the tables are placed, how a framed vector geometric representation of a sphere obscures the glass objects from certain angles and, last but not least, how these objects are placed in relation to each other.
There’s something next to it resembles a destroyed armillary sphere (a kind of ancient model of the solar system), with several blue celestial bodies piled up on the bottom. Or is it a spherical lottery drum without a crank, opening and with unnumbered balls?
The universe as a lottery with unclear drawing routines?
The blue returns. On another table sits a painted papier-mâché model of a strictly symmetrical ancient temple complex dedicated to observing the movements of the sun and planets. From a distance it looks like lapis lazuli, the surreal blue stone that resembles a fallen sky and has been excavated for thousands of years in Afghanistan’s harshest mountainous regions to become monuments to kings, jewelry for queens or ultramarine pigments for Renaissance artists.
About these works Unsettling space and space on various levels, a series of new collages depict the collapse of dimensions. The means are simple, but the execution is so precise. Matz has cut and pasted images of celestial bodies into landscape views, and natural scenes appear where one would expect a moon or a planet. Reflections and duplicates, unexpected views and black holes.
The geometry is flawless, but time and space pass. Like in a nightmare, when everything is clear and nothing is right.
Ebba Matz’s “Journey” is a journey into the coordinate system of existence, an attempt to relate to the fleeting. All space programs have been aesthetically inferior, while the images of and about space, from Stonehenge to the Matz exhibition, almost always have their own beauty.
It has now been over thirty years since she achieved her breakthrough with an installation in the Aronowitsch Gallery, which no one who saw it will forget. In the room there were several simple, fragile funnels made of white paper that came from old gramophones. Just as quiet as it is intrusive and strangely seductive. They reminded what everyone already knew, that in space no one can hear you scream. But also shown how the siren song of art opens doors to eternity.
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