The Perimeter is presenting Anna Uddenberg: HOME WRECKERS, the debut UK solo exhibition of the Berlin-based Swedish artist. Uddenberg’s multidisciplinary practice explores themes of taste, class, appropriation, sexuality, and power dynamics within a technology-driven consumer culture. The exhibition features sculptures of faceless, hypersexualized female figures critiquing the sexualization of women in domestic advertisements. Generic interior settings with soft furnishings create a backdrop for the sculptures, emphasizing staged associations of femininity and domesticity. The exhibition also includes Uddenberg’s first film, produced with Thyago Sainte. It’s a significant display of Uddenberg’s work, drawing attention to her ability to provoke authentic reactions in the digital realm. In conjunction with the Perimeter exhibition, she’s also exhibiting at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, and a co-published catalogue documents her practice. Anna Uddenberg, born in 1982, has a background in fine arts and has exhibited her works internationally, with notable shows in various galleries and museums.
Anna Uddenberg: Home Wreckers / The Perimeter London. London (UK), October 11, 2023.
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Press text:
The Perimeter is proud to present Anna Uddenberg: HOME WRECKERS, the first UK solo exhibition by the Berlin-based Swedish artist. Working primarily in sculpture, installation and performance, Anna Uddenberg’s practice reflects on taste and class, appropriation and sexuality, and explores systemised relations of power and conventions of control in the context of a technology-bound consumer culture.
At The Perimeter, Anna Uddenberg presents works made over the past seven years, featuring 10 sculptures of hypersexualised and overextended faceless female figures. The sculptures featured in HOME WRECKERS point at the absurdity in the sexualisation of the female form in advertisements for domestic items such as sofas, prams and even for laundry detergent. Uddenberg has created a range of generic interior environments as a setting for these sculptures, transforming The Perimeter with soft furnishings such as sofas and carpets to further emphasise the staged associations of femininity and domesticity. These staged domestic environments which could be found in homes, hotels, on reality TV sets or in furniture showrooms, feel both accessible and familiar. They evoke specific notions of expected behaviours, assigning a performative value to the acts undertaken therein.
Alongside these sculptures, Uddenberg presents her first ever film at The Perimeter, co-directed with Thyago Sainte. This film also marks The Perimeter’s first time supporting the production of a new commission, which will go on to be shown internationally. The work has been made possible with the additional support of Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler.
Uddenberg has reached art world, fashion and Internet notoriety with her practice. Three sculptures featured at The Perimeter were originally produced for a Balenciaga advertising campaign for its Balenciaga Crocs collaboration in 2021. Uddenberg most recently received a viral response to a performance piece, ‘Continental Breakfast’ staged at Meredith Rosen Gallery in April 2023. Provoking a strong and ‘real’ reaction in the digital space opens up Uddenberg’s practice, as she has long desired for her work to transcend representation, stating, “Instead of representing something, I want to trigger something so that it becomes real in a way.” As the lines between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Uddenberg postulates that “Maybe the fake is more authentic than whatever you think of as authentic”.
Concurrently with her exhibition at The Perimeter, Anna Uddenberg is staging an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in celebration of her being awarded the Hector Art Prize in 2022. In recognition of the conversation between these exhibitions, The Perimeter has co-published a catalogue with the Kunsthalle Mannheim, which documents the breadth of Anna Uddenberg’s practice to date.
Anna Uddenberg was born in Stockholm in 1982 and today lives and works in Berlin and Stockholm. She studied at Frankfurt Städelschule and Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Her works have been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including at Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York (2023); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2023); Centre Pompidou Metz (2023); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2022); Berghain Panoramabar, Berlin (2020); Athens Biennale, Athens (2018); Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Sankt Gallen (2018); House of Gaga Mexico City (2017); Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2017); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2017). Additionally, Uddenberg was the 2020 artist fellow for Black Cube Museum in Denver, CO, the recipient of the Hector Kunstpreis, 2022 and Overbeck-Preis für bildende Kunst, 2023.
