Exhibition

Mette Tommerup: Love, Ur

November 29, 2019 - January 26, 2020

Reception: November 29, 2019

Mette Tommerup Love Ur 7

Mette Tommerup has produced an installation designed to create a kind of enveloping, unbounded and psychologically charged space that evokes the primal and often inchoate sensations that linger just beneath our rational consciousness.

Exhibition Images

These are a selected group of works and installation photographs from the exhibition. For a complete list of available works please contact us.

Mette Tommerup: Love, Ur

Mette Tommerup has a new exhibition called Love, Ur curated by Tyler Emerson-Dorsch at Emerson Dorsch.  The first opening reception is Friday, November 29, 2-4pm. A second reception will take place during the Progressive Art Brunch on Sunday, December 1, 2019, 11am – 4pm. There will be a panel discussion with the artist, Tyler Emerson-Dorsch, and Lorie Mertes, director of Locust Projects, on January 8, 2020, 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition will be on view through January 18, 2020.

For this solo exhibition, Tommerup will create a complex installation from her dyed canvases, which debuted in her 2017 exhibition Ocean Loop. She will create zones of canvases, undulating like tectonic plates. In various planned interventions, she’ll invite friends and allies to animate her elements. These visitors will become protagonists, as are the canvases, in something like an analog video game. Her invitation will be to let them play. One of the interventions, called Start the New Year in Ur will be an experimental community activity on Saturday, January 11th, 3-5pm.

In her essay for the exhibition’s brochure, Eleanor Heartney described how the idea of Ur came to define the premise of this show:

“The installation’s title refers to Ur. Originally the name of an ancient Sumerian city, Ur has evolved to encompass the idea of the primal stage of any phenomenon. In Tommerup’s native Denmark, the word is often used to refer to the pre Christian Nordic world and its more essential connection to nature. In this installation Tommerup makes use of this association. But she also references The Urmaterial Urge, a 2004 essay by the art historian Johanna Burton that explores the idea of art as a kind of psychic space. Provocatively, Burton suggests many of the most prominent exemplars of this idea are male artists whose construction of womb-like spaces actually leave no room for female experience. Tommerup aims to change that.”

Heartney continues, Tommerup “has produced an installation designed to create a kind of enveloping, unbounded and psychologically charged space that evokes the primal and often inchoate sensations that linger just beneath our rational consciousness. Participants (the word viewer no longer seems appropriate) are free to wander through a chaotic world, making their own path between elements whose effects veer from the intimate to the overwhelming. The work is designed to imbue a sense of release that is at once unsettling, liberating and connective.”

Writer Biography
Eleanor Heartney has written regularly for the magazine Art in America for decades. She is also the author of many books about contemporary art including Art & Today published by Phaidon in 2008 and After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art, published by Prestel in 2013.

Mette Tommerup: Love, Ur | Programming

Receptions: Friday, November 29, 2019, 2 – 4pm
Progressive Brunch, Sunday, December 1, 2019, 11 am – 4pm

Panel: Wednesday, January 8, 2020, 6 – 8pm

Special Event: Start the New Year in Ur, Saturday, January 11, 2020, 2 – 4pm at Emerson Dorsch

About Mette Tommerup

Mette Tommerup (born Denmark 1969) is a painter and storyteller who creates simultaneously earnest and satirical narratives to frame her production of objects, whether they are digital or made from canvas and paint. Tommerup relocated to Miami in the late 1990’s after living and studying in New York City for many years. Tommerup has exhibited at The Chelsea Art Museum, Exit Art, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. In Miami, Tommerup has exhibited at The Bass, Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and The FIU Frost Museum of Art and has work in many public and private collections, including work in the permanent collection of Wilmer Hale in Washington DC, the Lowe Art Museum, and Perez Art Museum Miami. Love, Ur will be Tommerup’s 4th solo show at Emerson Dorsch. She will have a solo shows at Emerson Dorsch in 2019 and Locust Projects in November 2020. Honors include acquisition of work through the Art Purchase Program at The American Academy of Arts and Letters in NYC. Publications include Miami Contemporary Artists, Miami Arts Explosion, 100 Degrees in the Shade and Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze and exhibitions have been reviewed in Art in America, Artnet.com and the Miami Herald among other journals. Tommerup received an MFA at School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1995.

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Related

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