'Rainbow Rebel' by Coco Bergholm, 2022
15.75 x 15.75 Inches
40 x 40 Centimeters
Bold and colorful giclee print on archival 290gsm fine art paper.
Limited Edition of 35 (#7/35)
Hand-signed by the artist in pencil bottom right.
Numbered and publisher embossed bottom left.

ARTIST BIO

Can a system be modified non-violently? To what extent can public space be used as a place of discourse?

The urban space that surrounds us harbors a mass of changing signs and socio-cultural codes. Coco Bergholm's solo exhibition ›Echos‹ is dedicated to subtle communication structures, those that we sometimes only notice at second glance. In doing so, she employs the means of camouflage, which she uses in her work as a kind of cloak to sharpen the eye for inconsistencies and self-contradictions in our social patterns. Which facets of camouflage and privacy does the public – i.e. open – space offer? What potential for exchange, communication and opinion-forming does it hold?

Bergholm's starting point is the fold. Partly painterly and photographic, partly in the form of actual clothing, she brings wrinkled surfaces into the picture. In Bergholm's artistic approach, however, the fold appears anything but simple, because its visual presence refers to fundamental orders of reference: a drape of folds always requires a minimum of force, which changes the shape of the previously smooth fabric. Due to the flexible materiality of the connected fibers, one fold usually evokes another.

This mutual conditionality of the effective relationships can be metaphorically further explored in the spheres of language and signs, which Bergholm consciously integrates into her exhibition in the form of quotations and slogans. Every word and every gesture in turn requires another. A thesis or attitude taken has been triggered by a certain stimulus and in turn generates new impulses. Bergholm accepts and tests this kind of mutually animating bridges of association both in her artistic practice and in her conceptual exhibition arrangement.

Similar to Friedensreich Hundertwasser's ›concept of the three skins‹, according to which the human being is surrounded by three layers – the organic skin, the clothing and the building walls – Bergholm understands the public urban space as a kind of interwoven surface. Starting from a concrete materiality, urban characteristics such as graffiti, posters, lettering, etc. can be interpreted as a kind of change in the original form, as folds or reverberating echoes.

Each of us participates directly in it, not only as an acting, speaking individual, but also with the visual possibilities of expression of our own surface: with tattooed, made-up skin, with our clothes, with the design of our (living) space.

An echo is a reverberation that occurs when the reflections of a sound wave are delayed by a distance so much that the sound that preceded it is perceived as a separate auditory event. Thus the echo, like the continuing drapery, is similar but never identical to its predecessor. Applied as an artistic concept, this camouflaged deviation can at least trigger a change of perspective.
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Good (See Photos)

15.75 x 15.75 in