"STAINLESS STEEL RELIEFS"

In the 1960s the use of mirrors and reflective surfaces in sculpture grew widespread. This made it possible to demonstrate the importance of the viewer's movements in the exhibition space, questioning their relationship to the ego and exploring the phenomena of light reflection and destructuring of the space.

It was in this context that, from the late 1960s, Lars Fredrikson strated using stainless steel sheets for work that lies between engraving, painting, and sculpture, with the artist applying numerous interventions: scratches, lines, incisions, perforations, and hammering were executed on both sides of the sheets. He combined these gestures with traces of paint, sometimes completing them with mobiles made of plexiglas or metal or by curving their sirface.

Divided and fragmented, the viewer's body is never entirely reflected in these surfaces, despite the work being placed in such a way as to face them or even incorporate them. With these reliefs, Fredrikson was striking up a dialogue with the architectural space in which they stand, abolishing their limits; when subjected to vibrations (voices around them, tremors in the hanging surface), they echo and magnify their space-producing potential.

Extract from the text "Stainless steel reliefs" Catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Lars Fredrikson at the MAMAC in Nice, November 2019 (ed. MOUSSE PUBLISHING 2019, page 91)