Galerie Reinhard Hauff is pleased to announce the second solo show „Objects, Photographs, Writings, Objects“ with the Danish artist Lasse Schmidt Hansen (*1978). The artist, who now lives and works in Berlin, studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt until 2006. In his minimalist works, Lasse Schmidt Hansen explores the bureaucracy of standardized systems and the relativity of accepted and supposedly non-circumventable specifications and conventions – for example the scaling of millimetre paper, the architectural orientation of neon tubes within a room, the traditional positioning of Mies van der Rohe Barcelona stools, or the close to infinite number of combinations in which one can assemble a Billy bookshelf from Ikea. Through slight deviations from the established norms, which maintain compatibility and reference in the structure of our daily lives, the artist takes an easygoing approach to the logic, which governs the standards of industrial mass production, and our relationship to these norms. The observation which Lasse Schmidt Hansen brings to our attention through practical examples is how very frequently the „similar to“ does not equal „identical to“: The first level on the grey scale never corresponds exactly to the values on another grey scale, and within the mass production process of any object, quite substantial differences can appear in the end product – also if only noticeable upon a close second look. With ever so subtle gestures the artist therefore features formal as well as conceptual ambiguity as his central theme.

In this sense Lasse Schmidt Hansen’s „works can be like trapdoors that threaten to swallow us up because the solid ground of logic no longer holds“ (Lars Bang Larsen). The title of this show – „Objects, Photographs, Writings, Objects“ – refers to variety and variation to manifestations and appearances of the similar. Listing a constellation of different artistic practices in the title the word „Objects“ appear twice – which could be interpreted both as a typing error, the enumeration of mathematical sequence, or as a reference to the fact that also the word and/or concept „Objects“ can be read and understood in different ways depending on the context of the word and its position within the surrounding grammatical structure. Two of the exhibited works are titled „Version“: Firstly in the sense of a statement to the fact that the artwork in question only depicts one of many, different possibilities, and that the piece also could have ended up looking completely different. The photo depicts a pile of wooden boards cut to different sizes lying on the floor of the artist’s studio. Originally, the boards were intended for a systematic spacial object, which was, however, never realized. The second work with the title „Version“ consists of various silver foils, arranged provisionally at the end wall of the gallery space. Another work in the show titled „Making Things“, previously shown at the 2. Athens Biennial, depicts three views from an artist‘s studio deriving from different ways to make art.