Matti Sumari

Audio Guide

Listen to the artist describe the work in their own words:

Listen on Spotify – I am Threshold
Listen on Spotify – Big Frown

About The Works

I am Threshold

Sumari’s artistic interventions often extend to the exterior of exhibition spaces - to the public realm: A strange, humanoid figure sprouts from pre-existing bike racks. Our daily use of utilitarian objects is once again called into question when confronted by the enlarged extra-terrestrial, its reflective eyes forged from the aforementioned hammered metal. A silhouette with lobster-like bifurcated limbs. Crustaceans, aliens and androids aside, this spindly, slenderman shape is in fact the copy of a seaweed fragment (blæretang) that the artist found over half a decade ago. This sentimental - almost ceremonial - talisman has traveled with Sumari ever since and remains a recurring allegorical or anthropomorphic concern within his practice.

Big Frown

Geometric, gridded constructions of this series resemble fences, gates, or doorways. Here Sumari questions the nature of picture-making: what is the most inconvenient way to draw? To draft your motifs by bending square metal tubing into silhouettes. A frowning face, examining the surroundings with displease and a sidewalk with AC-unit on a wall. A door ajar revealing another extra-terrestrial, lobster-like figure as the inhabitant. Abstracted and flirting with functionality, they form the societal organism’s protective barriers, invariably utilized intending to keep out something unwelcome or lock in something desirable. Sumari plays with the barricading metal structures to form images, overlaying a double exposure on the cheerful surroundings of Tivoli.

About The Artist

Matti Sumari (b. 1987, Sweden) lives and works in Malmö, Sweden, and graduated with an MFA from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in 2014. He is interested in investigating the resources that can be extracted from urban surroundings, free slag materials, by-products of our way of life, sorted out through the city's metabolism into dump sites. Metal scrap, electronic waste, aluminum and copper: wasted ingredients are gathered and transformed sculptures. Matti practices small-scale home-built industrial production. Bronze casting with bronze age technology, sheet metal work, welding, and aluminum milling.

Matti Sumari is represented by Galleri Cora Hillebrand.

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