CRUCIAL DECISIONS

With the exhibition Crucial Decisions, Erik Andersen once again considers the process of decision making: from the decisions that weigh on us from day to day, to the structural ones that may be outside of our control. Illustrative of this is the new large-scale, wall-mounted sculpture, Besser Vertikal 02. Like Andersen’s practice more broadly, his latest work — which takes the form of an over-sized stack of paper with permanently curling edges — investigates materiality and process, emptiness and possibility. Rendered emphatically material through opaque black epoxy resin and made weighty in its scale, Besser Vertikal 02 is concerned with the status and position of physical media and processes in the present. At the same time, it questions the possibilities a seemingly blank sheet of paper may open up — the prospects and limitations such a medium might hold in our digital, pandemic age. Here, Andersen draws not only on the particularity of our current reality, but also the very process of making: art, decisions, rules. We, too, are enlisted as participants in the unfolding of this process: faced with limitless paths and no prescribed destination, with the prospect of infinity or else oblivion, as we navigate the uncertainty of the encounter that has been set before us. 

Julianne Cordray & Peter Wagner