Dan STOCKHOLM - No title (2020)

Stockholm’s art seeks a balance between the desire to reveal and the urge to conceal. He expresses this through a method that he calls the ‘performative process’, which refers to the production of art objects that carry the story of their own creative process within them. Visually, he tends to juggle with positive and negative spaces, and he captures the contrast between inside and outside.  

Stockholm created the sculpture No Title after a visit to the archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, a temple complex built by hunter-gatherers 12,000 years ago. The artist considers it one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries of our time. The fact that hunter-gatherers were able to build such a complex site not only revolutionises our understanding of their culture, but also challenges conventional views on the rise of civilisation.

Stockholm was in awe of the technical complexity of the structures and high-reliefs, and the quality of the sculptural shapes at Göbekli Tepe. To this day, there is no consensus on the exact function of the structures, and the mystery may perhaps never be fully unravelled. 

When the artist returned to his studio after his excursion to Göbekli Tepe, he found a container filled with a mixture of carefully selected types of clay. He repeatedly stuck his fingers into the clay and let the material record every step of the process. He then poured plaster into the cavities, creating a positive model of the negative spaces in the clay. The sculpture was carefully dismantled from the clay to partially expose the inside to the viewer. The result is a fossil that captures the interaction between the artist and the material.