18St.

MARTINE FLOR
“ECHOES FROM A SCENE”
26.06 - 18.07.2021 / opening night 26.06 - 7pm

Gallery Heerz Tooya proudly presents the solo exhibition, titled Echoes From A Scene, with new works by visual artist Martine Flor.

The Shroud of Turin is probably the most famous piece of fabric in Italy. It is said to have been wrapped around the body of Jesus at his burial. It is sensitive to light and air, and only shown on very rare occasions behind bullet-proof glass.

The shroud travels like a bullet through the history of images. First mentioned in the 14th century and later made famous by Pia Secondo in 1898, which rendered the Holy Face visible in the negative. The actual cloth is an image in itself and has within the study of signs during the 20th century been said to have the same indexical relationship to the thing depicted as a photograph. Miraculously they say the image of the face was made without hand.

As an instance within the history of images, Martine Flor's exhibition at Heerz Tooya seems to be pierced by this shrouded bullet. It revolves around the series of works called Echoes From A Scene I-III (2021). Flor's remarkable photogram technique used for the series brings the camera-less photography by surrealists such as Man Ray to mind, where the distance between subject matter and the capturing medium is abolished. They both operate through contact, but instead of distinct objects arranged on a flat surface, Flor’s technique embraces spatial configurations that are then turned into the flatness that characterises an image. The result prompts questions such as:

How ephemeral can touch be to still leave a mark? How much pressure is needed to inscribe memory into matter?
-Elias Kautsky

Martine Flor (b.1989, Norway) lives and works in Sweden where she holds an MFA from Malmö Art Academy (2018). In 2017 she did an exchange at Akademie der Bildende Künste Vienna (Textual Sculpture, prof. Heimo Zobernig) and in 2016 she was a guest student at Escola Maumaus in Lisbon. She has exhibited at Obra Gallery in Malmö, Malmö Art Museum, Trøndelag Center for Contemporary Art, among other places. In 2019 she assisted artist Mary Kelly in Los Angeles and this fall she will attend the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. www.martineflor.com

The exhibition is supported by the Norwegian Art Council.