magne f
‘alpha beta’
uk solo art exhibition
16 October – 14 November 2009
Paul Stolper, 31 Museum Street, London WC1
Magne Furuholmen is perhaps best known as composer / keyboard-player of legendary 80’s pop group a-ha. His career as a visual artist is somewhat less well documented here in the UK, yet in his native Norway, Furuholmen is an established name among collectors and his work is represented in many museums and institutions across Europe.
This autumn sees his first solo exhibition at Paul Stolper’s new gallery in Bloomsbury, London. Stolper’s stable of artists includes Peter Blake, Damien Hirst, Peter Saville and Gavin Turk.
Magne F, born 1962, began exhibiting in 1989. Self-expression through combinations of sound, words and imagery has since been a constant in his life: “With my visual work just like with music, I work with composition and rhythm, association and atmosphere”, he says.
His fascination with language was triggered when he was very young. His mother an English teacher, and his father a jazz-musician, the artist remembers finding hand-written notes in a trumpet case which he inherited after his father died tragically young in an airplane accident in 1969.
The notes contained song titles from a jazz-repertoire, that Furuholmen ‘felt an immediate urge to turn into something else’. The outcome was a series of woodcuts entitled 'Cut', with which Furuholmen burst onto the Norwegian art scene in 1994, with a surprisingly strong museum solo-debut at the Henie-Onstad Art Center, in Oslo.
The artist sees himself as a ‘kind of house-guest in the English language’, and the possibilities of language and communication continue to be an important topic in both his visual and musical work.
It is also the genesis for the new portfolio of prints on show this October. For “Alpha-beta”, a limited edition print series, Magne F has created an image for each letter of the Norwegian alphabet, 29 letters in all.
The first 500 prints sold will be accompanied by a vinyl record with something the artist refers to as a “word symphony”. The project involves a collaboration with the voice of a-ha vocalist Morten Harket, with the artist manipulating his bandmate’s voice and words, twisting them away from their origin into something new.
Magne comments: “I like the idea of deconstructing constructions, my own or other people's.
The alphabet can be seen as a kind of 'before' and 'after', as a marketplace of unused possibility, a place of components of possible words and as a scrapheap of language, where meaning and intent is reduced to the smallest fragments. They’re like the atoms of language. I also see this as something of a recirculation project, taking apart something meticulously constructed in one context and placing it in another; then melting and moulding it into something else entirely.”
The alpha-beta suite can possibly end up being the last word from the prolific artist: “I have spewed words like a man possessed the last 5 years”, Magne says. “Thousands of poems, hundreds of artworks with text, and truckloads of lyrics for songs as yet unrecorded...
it has to stop.”
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a-ha will tour the UK in November 2009:
Monday 2 November - National Indoor Arena – Birmingham
Tuesday 3 November - Manchester Evening News Arena – Manchester
Wednesday 4 November - O2 Arena – London
The new a-ha album ‘Foot Of The Mountain’ is released via UMRL on 13 July 2009
Already Number 1 in Germany, 22 June 2009
For further information please contact Jeanette Ward at Theresa Simon & Partners
020 7734 4800
Listings information
Lucy or Liz at:
Paul Stolper
31 Museum Street
London
WC1A 1LH
+44(0)20 7580 7001
http://www.paulstolper.com/
Gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm, or by appointment.