Solar Scars, 2025
duo show with Mark Walker at Showcase Lab 106, Frankfurt Am Main (DE)

Exhibition text written by Johan Andrén:
“I keep finding myself drawn to physical markings that tell of a past event, or at least a prior presence that is now an absence. Scars, trace fossils, an imprint my right ear left on my partner’s shoulder after I lay there for a while, craters from meteorites, the bored carvings I sometimes find in the benches at bus stops in Oslo, where Mark and I studied together. I think photography, which I spend so much time with, sometimes leaves me wanting, desiring a more tactile and textured imprint of the world which I try to capture with my camera. It might also be that I am a millennial in a hypermediated and simultaneously so de-materialised era. So slick and digital, always shining behind hardened glass, never accessible to the touch.

I had a pretty horrible bodily sensation when I first understood the origin of Mark’s work made of coins and razor blades. I’ve never witnessed serious injuries* but I imagine my stomach would feel the same. He told me that the constitutive parts of his spiral sculpture, two razor blades stuck to each side of a coin, mimic a street weapon from Northern England. When you cut someone with this makeshift tool, resulting in two gashes very close together, the thin strip of skin between the cuts never heals properly, falls off, and leaves a horrible scar behind. Maybe best that this work is stuck behind glass.

At the same time, the works that we share here are all made by our very careful and caring hands. When Mark speaks of his studio practice, he speaks of it in terms of labour, spending long periods of time focused on a process or motif, to see where he and the process can go together. Lately he has been sending me photos of his spiral drawings, he seems to enjoy the slow and calculated exploration of this technical geometrical exercise. I’m more eager on the other hand, I want fast results and an output from my experimentation. When I wanted to materialise my idea of casting fragments of a human face in tin, I asked my partner to sit for me, “out of convenience” was the conscious argumentation in my head but of course there’s a deeper meaning to all choices.

Suspended over the spirals of razor blades, the tin fragments of a face are affected and end up pretty horrible too, they speak more of butchery than the visual aspects of relationships and emotional mirroring that I’d thought of. Or is it the other way around? Do the cast faces open the spiral sculptures onto something more latent? There is such a sense of empathy in those cushioned stands.

When speaking to Mark about our little show, he mentioned that he had been thinking about planetary and solar rotations when making the spiral drawings, and how that related to the stars in the blown up rubbing that acts like a backdrop for the whole thing. He texted about vast solar systems and a sense of mortality.

I wonder if Mark left any marks in Oslo? I think he might be too careful and considerate to leave those kinds of imprints behind, but I have some snapshots of him.

* However, these days the top posts of my social media feeds are usually images from the genocide in Gaza. To digitally witness these atrocities is harrowing, to also be living in Norway which like Germany and most of Europe is passively complicit in the genocide just adds to the feeling of desperate hopelessness. It was a genocide on the Jews then, it’s a genocide on the Palestinian people now. Free Palestine!”

Mark Walker:
£15 & 747 razorblades, 2018, two pence coins, razor blades, stainless steel and cotton, 70 x 30 x 115cm
£5 & 249 razorblades, 2019, two pence coins, razor blades, stainless steel and cotton, 70 x 30 x 115 cm
Untitled (10 & 12 phase involute of a square), 2025, pencil on paper, 50 x 66cm
Untitled (10 & 12 phase involute of a triangle), 2025, pencil on paper, 50 x 66cm

Johan Andrén:
Planetary Phases, 2024, tin casts of artist’s partner’s face, variable dimensions
Anonymous Births, 2025, xerox prints, wallpaper glue (reproduction of graphite rubbing of gravestone), 286 x 200cm