ARTnews, Feb 2012
Anne-Karin Furunes / Barry friedman Ltd.
Anne-Karin Furunes's large-scale acrylic-on-canvas portraits and landscapes, based mostly on photographs found in Swedish archives dating from the 19105 and 19205. are haunting and at the same lime coldly systematic. The paintings in this show WcTe composed of loosely aligned arrangements of perforated canvas, patlerned like the halftone dots Ihal appear in newspapers. The circular cuts revealed the wall as the white area of the halftone. What read initially as a flat Warholian silk·screen process disclosed sculptural depth with light passing through the punctures in the canvas. This mediation of dramatic lighting established an ominous tone for the faces and scenes presented. Some of the paintings served as a sorl of archelypal Rorschach tesL In POl’tmit of Archive Pictures, V (all works 2011), for example, a young girl's dark eyes and bob haircut evoke pictures of Anne Frank, one of over a million children who died in the Holocaust. This image is so frequenlly regarded as Frank that the gallery has unorficially named it so. Yet not all the pictures here so arreslingly called to mind specific people. In images from Portrait of Archive Pictures. Vfft the profile and the frontal view of an adolescent female with braided hair feel as nonspecific as the work's title, remaining on the murky threshold of recognition.
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