Jouissance

June 18 - September 3, 2022

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg

Martha Edelheit

Diana Sofia Lozano

Örebro Art Gallery presents Jouissance with Martha Edelheit, Diana Sofia Lozano, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg. The exhibition offers bodies, buds and works of art about the complex nature of pleasure. The French term Jouissance tries to capture the transcendent state of heightened sense of life that is both able to create happiness and arouse feelings of discomfort and shame. Jouissance is part of OpenArt 2022.

Martha Edelheit (b. 32, USA) has depicted naked, erotic, tattooed bodies in portraits and monumental murals since the early 1960s. The body is the painterly material she captures in her natural state. In Edelheit's paintings, the body is a sensual place for pleasure and recreation. When they were first shown in New York in the 1970s, they were dismissed by the male-dominated art scene, but today they form a central part of our common art history.

Through installations with clay animation, music and sculpture, Nathalie Djurberg (b. 78, Sweden) and Hans Berg (b. 78, Sweden) depict an uncensored subconscious world. The video work Worship (2016) plays a role-play between body and object where the boundary between desire and the desirable seems dissolved. Their imagery plays with popular cultural banalities and reflects a fetish-oriented contemporary with an expression that touches on the absurd.

Diana Sofia Lozano (b. 92, Colombia) creates hybrid plant sculptures, at the same time invitingly sensual as well as toxic and sharp, which spread out in their own performative universe. Lozano's art is characterized by a fascination for the potent power and beauty of plants, as well as for nature as a geo- and identity-politically charged playground. The works both mimic and recreate the complex systems of reproduction, highlight genetically modified failures and criticize the gender-determining categorization system of science.