Mads Lynnerup: Someone Was Looking For Someone
April 15–June 25, 2022
Opening Reception Friday, April 15, 7–10 PM
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Mads Lynnerup: Someone Was Looking For Someone, opening Friday, April 15, 2022. Lynnerup’s practice incorporates video, performance, sculpture, and installation; his work acts as ephemeral, elusive commentary on the ways social and economic issues are expressed in everyday circumstances, as well as tendencies and trends within the art world.
Mads Lynnerup’s work often takes place in public space. Whether it’s focusing on daily routines in his home city of Copenhagen or chasing after a bus in San Francisco where he teaches, Lynnerup self-reflexively inserts himself as a performer in his own life, intervening in otherwise banal routines and spaces with humor and absurdity, heightening our own awareness of our social experience. For the exhibition Someone Was Looking For Someone, Lynnerup has written a series of short phrases which came into his mind during the pandemic. In the days preceding the opening of the exhibition, these phrases will appear unannounced in various locations throughout Buffalo — on construction equipment, a rock-climbing wall, clothing, signs, newspaper, flyers, store windows, etc. These looping, open-ended phrases interact with their environment and their incidental audiences, adding new, unexpected significance to their surroundings. Unlike other forms of text in public space, particularly advertisements, these statements have no brand or product attached to them, subtly forcing the viewer to contemplate their own relationship to the phrases and produce their own meaning out of them. Alongside the exhibition, Mads has developed a free newspaper that serves as a catalog and which also functions as a performative object to extend the exhibition back into the public space and beyond The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Visitors are invited to take the newspaper and document themselves reading it in their own favorite public spaces.
This exhibition has involved collaboration and support from artists, businesses, and collaborators all over the world including DJ Carr (photography), Nando Alvarez-Perez (photography), Peter Kees (screen printing), Dane Christensen (video), Hayley Carrow-Janecki at Ró Homeshop, Aaron Bartley at Fitz Books and Waffles, Sarah Fabrizio and the staff at Superior Auto Sales, Bello Bello, Brianna Battista, Lydia Kegler, Kylie Priscilla, Andrea Alvarez, Aaron Blumenthal, Joe Caprio, and Jon Spoly and Sean Green at Buffalo River Works.
Mads Lynnerup received an MFA from Columbia University in New York City and a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Lynnerup has an extensive national and international exhibition record including commissions and exhibitions at Creative Time, PS.1, MTV, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; The Mori Art Museum; Tokyo; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany to mention a few. He is a Eureka Fellowship recipient as well as an Artadia, and Toby Devan Lewis Award winner. In addition, he is currently the chair of the New Genres program and an assistant professor at the San Francisco Art Institute.
This program is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Services Inc.
