27.2.—30.3.2025

Kohta continues its series of exhibitions by younger Nordic artists with ‘Services’, a selection of recent three-dimensional work by Villiam Miklos Andersen (Denmark, 1995, lives in Frankfurt am Main and Copenhagen).

His sculptural thinking hinges on transposition and permutation, artistic transactions that allow familiar designs to inhabit unexpected materials and let images shapeshift into objects and vice versa. His works perform different services simultaneously, pitching professional contexts and production methods against each other and striving to find common ground for concept and process.

In his artistic practice, Andersen exploits his own experience as a licensed truck driver acquainted with the motorways and roadhouses of continental Europe. He also benefits from opportunities to delegate the execution of his image-objects to specialist fabricators.

The two series of works on display in Kohta’s studio gallery, Water Sports and Transactions (both 2024) were featured in Andersen’s recent solo exhibition Caffè Crema at O–Overgaden in Copenhagen (23 November 2024 – 26 January 2025, curated by Vera Østrup). That exhibition, in turn, marked the culmination of Andersen’s participation in O–Overgaden’s one-year postgraduate program INTRO, generously supported by the Louis-Hansen Foundation.

For Water Sports, Andersen has translated the urinals in German truck stops into four oakwood sculptures. The sloping surface just above the actual bowl, where advertising would typically be placed, is inlaid with intaglio prints of black-and-white photographs taken in the port town of Narvik in northern Norway and showing a cargo ship waiting in line to receive its load of Swedish iron ore. With their dramatically enhanced blackness, these images have a haunting cinematic quality and add a layer of pictorial mystique to what might otherwise have been an exercise in conceptual sculpture.

The six intarsias in tropical wood – made by expert craftsmen in Mysore, India, and still partially crated after being shipped to Copenhagen – are rendered after Andersen’s snapshots of operations performed by the ‘working hands’ at the world’s largest food market in Rungis near Orly. This has been ‘the belly of Paris’ since the demolition of Les Halles in 1972. Again the work delivers an autonomous visual statement, one that transcends the relational intricacies of subcontracted fabrication. Andersen’s liaison to the working hands in Mysore, with its ancient intarsia tradition, was the artist Dayananda Nagaraju.

Villiam Miklos Andersen graduated from Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2021 (class of the German sculptor Judith Hopf) and from the Jutland Art Academy in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2020. He has exhibited at venues such as 1Shanthiroad in Bengaluru, India, and Simulacra in Beijing, both in 2023, Documenta 15 in Kassel and Frankfurter Kunstverein, both in 2022, and Kunsthal Aarhus in 2020. He was awarded the G+G Art Award Nord in 2023 and the Aarhus Art Prize in 2020, and he was shortlisted for the German ars viva Prize for Visual Arts in 2022.

The exhibition at Kohta is realised with support from the Nordic Cultural Fund and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.