Eighteen is pleased to present
With me! You shall live with me
A solo exhibition by Lulu Kaalund
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY AUGUST 20. 2021. TIME: 16.00 – 21.00
EXHIBITION PERIOD: AUGUST 21 – SEPTEMBER 18. 2021
With an extraordinarily well-developed sense for composition and colour work, Lulu Kaalund’s approach to crochet is rare. Working intuitively and only by hand, she often commences without a set strategy; the works emerge slowly and organically, spanning wearable pieces to large scale tapestries. In her first solo exhibition with Eighteen, the artist has worked in a multitude of formats; vibrating between sculpture and painting, intimate and finely meshed pieces (35 x 40 cm) as well as large and loosely composed works (255 x 440 cm) are presented on the walls, lying on the floor, or wrapped around a body. Betokening stamina and patience on the verge of the manic, the largest pieces are undertakings that evolve over months of labour - material witnesses to the passage of time and to an artistic process that is at once meditative and strenuous. Gripped by an urge to create, Kaalund appears as a medium destined to deliver wild, seductive, and self-willed works to us from another plane of existence.
Defying the traditional associations of crochet, the artist always brings her yarns and needles along while travelling the world. The exhibition borrows its title from a conversation between Winnie the Pooh and Piglet from the film Winnie the Pooh and the Bulstery Day (1968), serving as a tongue-in-cheek play on the contrast between the domestic history of her craft and the nomadic nature of her process.
Lulu Kaalund, born 1988, lives and works in Copenhagen and wherever the road may take her. Geometric yet organic, meticulous yet spontaneous, Kaalund’s playful crochet frolics in the interstices between contemporary art and folk art: Vivid and unexpected palettes grow and merge into optical assemblages that nonetheless retain a sensual tactility enabled by the artist’s deft familiarity with her materials. Her work has received enthusiastic acclaim in Wallpaper (March, 2021), I-D Magazine (January, 2021), and from NY Magazine’s senior art critic Jerry Saltz, who proclaimed on his Instagram as a comment to a selected series of various crocheted Kaalund works: “all good paintings to me” (2020).
