Artist: Bella Rune

Galleri Magnus Karlsson presents Bella Rune’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Planet features new works that criss-cross between two and three dimensions in sculptures, objects and works on paper.

The exhibition title itself suggests an ambiguity that is characteristic of Bella Rune’s artistic practice (The word Planet can mean either planet, airplane or surface in Swedish). She utilises the everyday, the tangible and the fundamental to aim for something expansive and grand. In her most recent works, she has taken an interest in simple machines: basic mechanical devices that alter the direction or magnitude of a force to make work easier. The classic examples are the lever, the inclined plane, the wedge, the screw, the wheel and axle, and the pulley.

The series Planet is a suite of works on paper engaged in a playful dialogue with geometric, non-figurative art. Here, an action involving rope or string has left traces on the surface, inspired by the technique of string-marking – an ancient method of marking a line between two points by stretching a thread and snapping it to create an impression. In the wall-mounted sculpture The Simple Machines, a checkered image is literally balanced by weights and ropes, creating a shifting motif in motion. Thick at One End and Tapering at the Other, is a structure made of a wind-felled spruce, where the log has been split for firewood and timber. The wood has been used both for a podium and a spherical sculpture in which split sticks have been placed under tension. The wall piece The Net in natural fibre is material-realistic and at the same time a simulated mirror image. Here, the flat surface of the textile and the digital three-dimensional weightlessness collide and interact. The exhibition is tied together by a series of works, Trajectory, in coloured, felted wool, which are dynamically arranged throughout the rooms. They give form to something that usually appears in a two-dimensional environment and lend materiality and poetry to a simple dotted line.

One of humanity’s magical tricks is that we can take a line and transform it into a surface. Transient materials fade away, but their traces remain in the solutions and tricks we use to overcome our limitations. From an infinitely small point with no extension whatsoever to the incomprehensible infinity of the universe.
- Bella Rune