source: samuelfreeman

Torbjörn Vejvi creates sculptures that explore subtle existential relationships between form and memory, introspection, and everyday life. With both coyness and sincerity, Vejvi’s exuberant abstract constructions combine formal references from the history of modern art with the psychological and social tensions inherent in 3-dimensional space. In his pointedly handmade painted sculptures installed throughout this exhibition, Vejvi turns a bookshelf, a pair of open-faced boxes and a tabletop surface into playfully mysterious tableaux, where cigarette-encrusted books, tea sets made from paper, and silhouettes of tree-lined promenades become entry points to a daydream space of subtly shifting dimensions.
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source: frieze

Torbjörn Vejvi is one of a group of young LA-based sculptors including Jason Meadows, Liz Craft, Evan Holloway, and others known for their explorations into two-dimensional representation and exuberantly three-dimensional abstraction. They share an interest in the physics of object making, and manage to meld principles from science and mathematics with imagery of personal significance, creating playful, mysterious hybrids. Vejvi’s work is unique in its ability to contain within its elegant and innovative constructions an almost paranormal reservoir of exquisitely measured feeling that simultaneously appears to dictate the form of each sculpture, and haunt its confines in an almost helpless way.

Vejvi’s variously sized and shaped sculptures seem to have been built as memorials to some excited, possibly profound, and now questionable brainstorm he had in his youth. The works are pointedly handmade, yet for all the feckless, art-class orientation of their materials – foamboard, felt-tip pens, Masonite, vinyl film, raw lumber – they are almost mystifyingly serene, as though half-tinkered, half-meditated into their final forms. Often hollow, it’s in their power to make you think about their volume, less as empty cubes and rectangles than as compartments for some missing physiological engine. They use their identity as sculpture the way poetry uses language and punctuation, so that even lowly nails, screws, and brackets make slight but fundamental contributions to the work’s mesmerising mix of innocence and erudition. It’s a quality that makes you ache to learn what kind of flawless, lost answers would cause the artist to pose such beautifully unanswerable questions.

Even in Vejvi’s more modest works there is grace, wit and evidence of original thinking. For example a green and white floor piece, Stadium #3, is simultaneously a miniature, mis-painted tennis court with accompanying grandstands, and a horizontal abstract work on paper with corresponding frame, while Boutique is a wall-mounted cardboard box tiled with an intricate, hyper-Mondrian-like composition that turns contemporary design’s usurpation of high Modernist motifs back on itself. With most first shows, you usually hope for surprise, a modicum of skill, and ideas clever enough to freshen the experience of gallery hopping. Vejvi has not only exceeded those expectations, but confounded them as well. By giving sculpture not only such subtle, seductive new shapes, but also the ability to exude and inspire pure, unironic feeling, he has accomplished something so rare that it’s difficult to think of recent precedents.