Oskar Mörnerud, Malmö

Oskar Mörnerud: Panorama/Midbody
Moderna Museet Malmö
16.11 2011-22.1 2012

The Malmö-based artist Oskar Mörnerud is the first recipient of the newly established Fredrik Roos Art Prize – one of the largest stipends in Sweden in support of young artists’ further development. On November 16, Oskar Mörnerud, will receive the stipend and his exhibition Panorama/Midbody will open at Moderna Museet Malmö, where a completely new work will be featured.

Oskar Mörnerud (1976) studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and today he lives and works in Malmö. His work is permeated with a fascination for the mechanisms of perception, the limitations of words, and the mystery of reality. Oskar Mörnerud creates sculptures and installations but is perhaps best known for his paintings, which are often based on photos, illustrations and newspaper cuttings as models in new and startling context.

– In his works, Mörnerud recurrently deals with the relationship between the external world and the mental image of the world. What is it we don’t see when we see, and how do language and learned references influence how we systematise our perceptions and construct our world image? In installations based on fragmented painting – and with strong links to biology, religion and language – he explores how we absorb the world, through our bodies, our metabolism and on a cellular level, says curator Joa Ljungberg.

In the new work, Panorama/Midbody, which is presented for the first time at Moderna Museet Malmö, Oskar Mörnerud brings together an illusionistic painting tradition – the panorama – with cellular biology. The work is a seven-meter-long painting that in the black-painted gallery space appears like a projection. Fragmented pictures and geometric figures form two linked ovals that recall the way a cell duplicates its set of chromosomes and then divides into two daughter cells. The two ovals confront us like a pair of gigantic eyes, and these eyes offer us a panoramic glimpse into a fragmented world. The work can be described as an intermediate form between a painting and a text, and the piece invites us to reflect on the interface between the actual world and our worldview.