Synopsis "Premium Economy"
Anna Uddenberg's art pursues an ambitious and polarizing perspective on physicality, gender, and commercial aesthetics. The artist's sculptures and performances examine the inextricable entanglements that novel technologies engender between consumerism, spirituality, and self-promotion. Uddenberg rose to renown in the 2010s primarily with her hypersexualized figures riding through the gallery space on trolleys, their selfie sticks extended toward the sky and their butts, booties, crutches, pussies. Yet beyond these lascivious and provocative representations of bodies, Uddenberg's work is always also a play with space. In new works, she turns her attention to the real estate market and heterotopian infrastructures. The use of medical or automobile skeletal structures refers to the concepts of care and comfort as means of control. Uddenberg's first monograph, featuring works created since 2010, is released on occasion of the artist's receipt of the 2022 Hectorpreis. It contains a foreword by Johan Holten, director of Kunsthalle Mannheim, and a conversation with the artist by the writer and curator Samuel Staples. Caroline Busta, founder of the media platform New Models, approaches Uddenberg's work that intrigues as a futuristic result of multiple rearrangements of everyday objects and materials.
