Do Nothing Machine: Eric Oglander

5 April - 19 July 2024 London

Overview

Opening April 5, 2024 | 6 - 8 pm

curated by Lola Kramer

Bernheim is pleased to present a monographic exhibition of New York-based artist Eric Oglander’s “Do Nothing Machine” featuring approximately 87 small-scale sculptures made between 2020 and 2024. This marks the artist’s first show at the gallery and his first exhibition of sculpture in London. The exhibition will also include two new lamps made in collaboration with the artist Chris Beeston.

Self-taught and driven by experimentation and craft, Oglander’s practice involves creating intimately scaled minimalist sculptures that provoke subtle optical or scientific nuance. Characterized by everyday materials such as men’s button-down shirts, plywood, branches, metal, and found objects, Oglander’s sculptures convey an intuitive sense of object-making, each underscored by their fundamentally haptic nature.

Many of Oglander’s sculptures involve rudimentary physics inspired by children’s science lessons. Works like Taut, 2024 use magnets and string to hold nails in suspension, demonstrating the invisible forces of nature. Who’s Holding Who, 2024, composed of street sweeper bristles bent into bows, explores the phenomena of “constant stress” passed along a single string. Among the works on display are nine functioning wooden trebuchets and catapults inspired by the artist watching the History Channel as a child. The assembled materials, each coated in white paint, are unified and neutralized, rendering the newly formed objects a coherent whole. When a trebuchet sculpture like Bad Neighbor, 2024, is at rest, it exemplifies the palpable presence of the hand and reads as a personal artefact; once engaged, it introduces the excitement of kinetic, transferred energy.

Oglander’s handling of everyday materials frequently results in “accidental souvenirs.” Sculptures like Butterfly Tongue (2023), created from the byproduct of whittling, produce a delicate, coiling, and curling tendril of splintered wood, illuminating the nuanced beauty of meditative actions not necessarily meant to produce art. Likewise, the rippling moiré effect generated by the muted striped color of a button-down shirt stretched across painted plywood in Come Here. Go Away, 2024, elegantly negotiates the combination of lines, dots, and the translucent quality of the fabric to produce unexpected optical illusions. Oglander’s reverence for the natural world is further exemplified in sculptures like Plants Split, Plants Chewed, 2024, using materials made by both man and insect. Here, the fragments of a hornet's nest are applied to the “split ash” wood from an antique chair and interwoven into a delicate grid.

The light-heartedness applied across these intuitive decisions is typified in sculptures like Pocket Change (2024), which transforms a “painting” into a functional container. 1984, in c. 1930, 2024, displays a single embedded U.S. Quarter into a segment of painted pine flooring, an act that removes the object from everyday circulation, establishing it as an individual object of deference and evoking the superstitious practice of placing coins in the foundations of buildings for good luck, elevating them to the status of an amulet. This gesture also recalls the artist’s recontextualization of found objects in “Craigslist Mirrors,” a vernacular photography project initiated in 2014 in which Oglander collected over 2,000 images of mirrors for sale on the popular website ‘Craiglist’ into one ongoing Tumblr feed.

An avid collector of unusual one-off antiques (objects crafted without the explicit intention of viewership and not made to be consumed as artworks), Oglander opened Tihngs in 2022, a storefront selling unusual vernacular objects in front of his studio in Ridgewood, Queens.

Lola Kramer

Eric Oglander (b. 1987, Nashville, TN) is a self-taught sculptor whose practice is informed formally, structurally, and materially by his multifarious interests. Oglander’s work has been exhibited in solo presentations at Patrick Parrish Gallery, New York; Swivel Gallery, NY; Deli Gallery, NY; his work has been presented in group shows at 1969, NY; Management, NY; His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Fine Art Museum at Western Carolina University, North Carolina; Institute 193 in Lexington, Kentucky; Cob Gallery in London, UK; NADA x Foreland in Catskill, NY. Oglander has also worked as an assistant to American sculptor Robert Gober since 2017.

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info@bernheimgallery.com

Works