Ulf Rollof: Urgent

The exhibition Urgent spans over almost forty years, from the early 1980s until today. For the first time a comprehensive review of Swedish artist Ulf Rollof’s art is offered which illuminates themes and common threads running through his artistic career. Ulf Rollof’s works are at the same time personal explorations of the great issues and challenges of our day, while at the same time dealing with what is universally human.

Ulf Rollof (b. 1961) has worked with a multitude of different materials and expressions—sculpture, works on paper, moving images, experimental painting, mechanical installations, and photography. The exhibition Urgent features some twenty works, ranging from his early watercolors to photographs, from large installations to his shooting paintings and the latest large lightbox paintings. Moderna Museet has a comprehensive collection of Rollof’s work, and the exhibition complements these with a number of important pieces on loan from private collectors and from the artist himself. Visitors will now get a chance to experience a rich and broad body of work by an artist whose work feels very relevant today.

The exhibition Urgent is an existential, physical, and tangible experience that activates our senses beyond just sight. A number of the works are also monumental in size, dominating the entire Turbine Hall. One of these is Angel Trap (1984)—a landing strip for angels—which is being exhibited for the first time, hanging vertically from a height of 11 meters. The work Lifeboat (1990) will be shown for the first time after a comprehensive restoration, in a large presentation of all the original 365 wax boats.

Ulf Rollof creates his art in dialogue with what he is experiencing here and now. But although the point of departure is always the artist’s own experiences, the resulting works are never private; they touch on the universally human with great force. Rollof’s work deals in various ways with boundaries—boundaries between the organic and the artificial, and between the rational and the occult, as well as physical national boundaries. Other recurring themes include time and movement, and the relation between two opposites—such as hot and cold, life and death, man and animal.

Ulf Rollof’s art has been shown all over the world, including at Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany in 1992, at the Venice Biennale of 1999, and at Mexico City at MUAC in 2009. A richly illustrated catalogue is being produced in conjunction with the exhibition, which will be published this fall.

Curator: Iris Müller-Westermann

With support from the City of Malmö, Region Skåne and the national government of Sweden.