Friday October 28, Hans Alf Gallery invites everyone to join the opening of two new exhibitions: Fredrik Raddum’s “Mindless Actions and Unfinished Stories” in the main gallery, and Frank Fischer’s “New Works” in the HAG project room.Fredrik Raddum’s new exhibition is fundamentally different from the string of exhibitions that precedes it. Usually the Norwegian sculptor starts out with a philosophical dilemma, an existential conundrum that he explores, dissects and ultimately illuminates – often with the help of great thinkers like Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. Like a seasoned captain of metaphorical oceans, he circumnavigates the murky waters with his tongue in his cheek, and presents a clean-cut yet allegorical vision to his audience. In this way, Raddum’s work has always been a fascinating balancing act, suspended high above the crowd, constantly aware of the risk of plummeting into either the purely comical on one side of the wire, or the all-too-intellectual on the other. Always – of course – succeeding.But this time around, Fredrik Raddum decided to rid himself of his creative bents, tear up the script and start afresh. Instead of drowning himself in literature and disappear into the proverbial rabbit hole, he opened his studio doors and went for a walk. Maybe it was the fatigue brought on by months of de facto isolation during the pandemic, maybe it was just a basic desire to clear his head, but something compelled the sculptor to employ a different approach, to open up his mind and act instinctively on any inspiration he might encounter, to become a blank canvas to the world.A few hundred meters from his house, he came across large pieces of wood. He started gathering them, and before he knew it, he was turning them into grotesque, life-size figures in his studio. He modelled marvellous bonfires – the largest of them more than 2 meters tall. He made a series of feet (in shoes) that had somehow managed to outpace the rest of their bodies. The ultimate escapism, one might say. He made a mobile of a fragmented man; a face frozen in terror, a scrotum dangling from a wire. He made a sculpture so tall, it would never fit into the space it was intended for. But it didn’t really matter. By toppling his own process and just doing, what he felt like, Raddum had ultimately created something very different from anything he had previously done. The absence of intent and his refusal to tell a story from A to Z had yielded something brand new; a timely rift in his oeuvre; a grand display of mindless actions and unfinished stories. Without even trying, he had somehow made a show. And found a title.
