Benedicte Gyldenstierne Sehested

Greenspon is pleased to announce You Be You, Berlin-based artist Benedicte Gyldenstierne Sehested’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. On view are new bodies of work which engage with photography, sculpture and inventive hybrids through these two mediums. Sehested’s background in analogue photography and printing techniques lends her use of the medium a distinctive materiality. Over the last decade this sensibility has been channeled into the production of figurative sculptures. In You Be You, the differing modes of photographic and sculptural presentation interact in complex ways to contend with the proposition embedded in the exhibition’s title.

The gallery space is dominated by an enlarged digital print of a 1980’s Danish advertisement. The image shows three children engrossed in prescribed craft activities, supervised by their father. But it is the maternal figure in the background, reviewing correspondences, who attracts our attention. Her gestures convey the existence of an interior world. The hand touching the back of her neck and her slightly tilted head are an assertion of her individuality against the backdrop of family. This attentiveness to gesture is echoed in the five figurative sculptures, which inhabit the gallery space. Articulated body parts are rendered in a variety of sculptural techniques and materials that suggest the possibility of reconfiguration. Some of the materials mimic what they represent: pinkish wax over starched cotton and latex sheets suggest skin; hair growing inside a clear, cast resin head recalls the literalness of a child’s imagination.

A photograph of a grouping of the sculptural figures printed directly onto high density upholstery foam plays out the exhibition’s tautological investigation. The difference between representation and sculptural object collapses on this spongy, polymorphous surface. Six customized print-on-demand mugs, of the kind gifted to family members, display an image of one of the figurative sculptures in the show. The absurdity of attempting to individuate and personify these otherwise seemingly anonymous sculptures is a deft, comic touch.