Untitled (edition), Bjarne Melgaard 67,5 x 56 cm, Inkjet Print on Canson 310 gsm, edition of 50 + 5 APs. Each print is signed and numbered by the artist in the front.
“You were real… that’s what made you so good to watch.” For viewers of Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, it can be hard not to see the similarities in its narrative with present-day life. In the pre-pandemic era, the film was often cited as a forecast of the voracious appetite society would develop for reality TV, exploring the blurry boundaries existing between reality and scripted performance.
However, in light of COVID-19, the parts of our lives that had resisted being digitally co-opted suddenly went virtual. Club nights were substituted for Zoom DJ sets, new fashion collections were presented via short films and galleries went online. As such, you’d be forgiven for feeling as though life had been reduced to a deluge of streamable links.
Indeed, this is precisely the subject of Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard’s recent neo-expressionist masterpiece, Untitled, now available in an edition courtesy of KÖNIG Editions. Depicting a frantic figure exasperatedly trying to break out of a trance, Melgaard’s distressed sentiments suggest that it might be time to pull the plug.
‘Untitled’ by Bjarne Melgaard is now available on KÖNIG edition online store.