MALMO.- Just before the Midsummer holiday Moderna Museet Malmö is opening a comprehensive exhibition in the Turbine Hall of Ulf Rollof’s complex and multifaceted art. Urgent addresses the major issues of our day, and summarizes forty years of Rollof’s artistic career in an existential and physical experience.

Since the 1980s, Ulf Rollof (b. 1961) has worked with a multitude of different materials and expressions—sculpture, works on paper, moving images, experimental painting, mechanical installations, and photography. The exhibition Urgent features some twenty works, ranging from his early watercolors to photographs, from large installations to his shooting paintings and the latest large lightbox paintings. Moderna Museet has a comprehensive collection of Rollof’s work, and the exhibition complements these with a number of important pieces on loan from private collectors and from the artist himself. Visitors will now get a chance to experience a rich and broad body of work by an artist whose work feels very relevant today.

The exhibition Urgent is an existential, physical, and tangible experience that activates our senses beyond just sight. A number of the works are also monumental in size, dominating the entire Turbine Hall. One of these is Angel Trap (1984)—a landing strip for angels—which is being exhibited for the first time, hanging vertically from a height of eleven meters. “Angel Trap is one of the large-scale installations we’re showing in the exhibition,” says Iris Müller-Westermann, the Museum Director and the show’s curator. “We’re also showing Lifeboats, for the first time after a comprehensive restoration, in a large presentation of all the original 365 wax boats.”

Ulf Rollof creates his art in dialogue with what he is experiencing here and now. But although the point of departure is always the artist’s own experiences, the resulting works are never private; they touch on the universally human with great force. Rollof’s work deals in various ways with boundaries—boundaries between the organic and the artificial, and between the rational and the occult, as well as physical national boundaries. Other recurring themes include time and movement, and the relation between two opposites—such as hot and cold, life and death, man and animal.

“Ulf Rollof does not confine himself to a definable style or expression,” says Müller-Westermann. “The exhibition Urgent now offers, for the first time, a look back that reveals instead the themes and common threads that run through the entire body of his work.”

Rollof’s art has been shown all over the world, including at Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany in 1992, at the Venice Biennale of 1999, and at Mexico City at MUAC in 2009. Rollof was born in 1961 and now lives and works in Stockholm. A richly illustrated catalogue is being produced in conjunction with the exhibition, which will be published this fall.