Øystein Aasan’s practice uses architecture, books, collage, sculpture and painting to address memory, the function of images and the place of the viewer. Aasan’s works function as a game of visual contrast and compare. The modernist grid is taken on a play date with images from the leftovers of a visual history associated with popular culture. Aasan picks these images from old magazines or images that are mass-produced and potentially limitless in quantity. As such they are examples of the norm in art post-pop. Both through references and the use of found imagery, post-modernist art keeps seeping through the cracks of the modernist grid. Or perhaps rather the grid is being superimposed over the found image. This could easily be interpreted as an attempt to re-describe the assumed literary, qualities of referentiality that we normally ascribe to post-modern art. The result is a feeling of visual tension that is optically immediate, but also conceptually striking since what is at stake is the very distinction between modernist and post-modernist ways of understanding the image. Aasan’s work makes the connection between grid and multiple obvious by combining them in objects that themselves appear anonymously unique. (Text by Erlend Hammer)

Øystein Aasan (born 1977, Kristiansand, Norway) received his education from the National Collage of Art and Design, Oslo. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Lautom, Oslo; Stenersen Museum, Oslo; Sørlandets Art Museum, Kristiansand; PSM, Berlin; Momentum Biennale, Moss, Norway; Migros Museum, Zürich; Kunstverein Arnsberg, Arnsberg, Germany; and La Vitrine, Paris. He has published texts and essays in several international magazines. Aasan lives and works in Berlin.