Allan Rand
‘Machine Breakers’
23 February to 5 April 2024
Moon Grove is pleased to announce ‘Machine Breakers’, the first solo exhibition in the UK by the itinerant Danish painter Allan Rand. The artist’s recent paintings and drawings, made in Paris during 2023 and Broulee, New South Wales in early 2024, contain references to twentieth century writers such as Fernando Pessoa and Antonin Artaud alongside Manchester’s Luddites, a group of late eighteenth-century textile workers who helped inspire the city’s radical political history.
The first work in the exhibition, also titled Machine Breakers, refers to the Luddites’ activities by showing a repeated image of a figure destroying a loom or knitting frame with a hammer. If these middle-class artisans wrecked machinery introduced for mass production as a last resort when discussions with mill owners broke down, then Rand’s work connects a seminal political moment in northern England alongside contemporary cliches around the pros and cons of mechanical reproduction in modern and contemporary art, including pre-war theories written by Walter Benjamin, the repetition of imagery in Pop by Andy Warhol in the 1960s and the introduction of AI in the twenty-first century. Adding further local relevance and a touch of humour, the figures in Rand’s hand-made Xeroxed work are pictured with bees’ wings, a reference to Manchester’s ‘worker bee’ logo that reflects a model city made by its inhabitants. Literally speaking, this image points to a fantastic flight from mechanisation – ironically through drawn hand-printed repetition – and by implication, digital reproduction’s fracturing and productive reordering through the technology of painting.
References to the erosion of mechanical structures that render us clockwork continue in Moon Grove’s living room, where Rand has installed granular steel dust in various states of decay on the room’s mantel piece, a prop surrounded by works informed by themes of fragmented travel across continents through time and space. Street Corner (Tribeca – Nepal Mountaineering Supply) locates an image in two places at once, scrambling and restructuring geography and duration. In this case, New York and Nepal vie for attention, while the painting draws formally and stylistically on modern works such as the uncanny scenes of Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, and the mute still lives of Giorgio Morandi. Similarly, Roamer and Cartographer’s Orchard refer to the artist’s peripatetic life as he travels from place to place, from his native Denmark to New York, Brussels, Paris, Düsseldorf and back to his family in New South Wales, Australia.
The exhibition also includes a suite of works connected to nature and shifts in psychological states, including Spice Garden (African Scene) and Smoker (The 360 Initiative), while literature and the performative aspect of Rand’s work are evident in The Theatre and Its Double. This painting, like many others in the exhibition, uses Artaud’s famous 1938 series of essays that call for a communion between actor and audience in a magic exorcism involving unusual scenery to form a language that might subvert thought and logic in the viewer. In essence, Rand’s project is a similar attempt to challenge regimes of time, space, social context, and mechanical thought through contemporary painting.
Allan Rand (b. 1983, Denmark) lives and works between Düsseldorf, Paris and Broulee, New South Wales. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Tomma Abts, and at the Royal College of Art in London. Solo and two-person exhibitions include those at Poush, Paris (2023), Bossy’s Gallery, Melbourne (2022), Chauffeur, Sydney (2020), Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf (2018) and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne (2018).
