Spill

The Blue Star Contemporary Berlin Residency Program elevates the international contemporary art landscape and fosters global collaboration through our partnership with the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. Each year, Blue Star selects 4 San Antonio artists for three-month residencies in Berlin, where they join 24 other artists from around the world. Building on this exchange, Blue Star is pleased to welcome fellow Künstlerhaus Bethanien resident artists to San Antonio, further fostering our international collaborations and mission to nurture San Antonio's art community.

In Winter 2015, Blue Star presented Landscapes by the Book, a video by Norwegian artist Bodil Furu (KB resident from January 2014-15), which explored how modernity has altered the landscape of Fron, Norway. Spill by Jenny Magnusson is the third exhibition developed as a result of Blue Star’s relationship with the KB, presented in partnership with Trinity University at the Michael and Noemi Neidorff Gallery. Magnusson was a resident at KB from October 2014-15.

Jenny Magnusson works with sculpture and installations, whereby space and place are the decisive factors in her development of a work. She uses everyday materials and things that she finds, borrows or acquires, incorporating them into the exhibition space in a process of exchange with people and places from her surroundings. She looks for a precise relation between the things and objects, the material and their positions within the space. Magnusson's working materials are parts of sculptures rather than chapters of a specific story. They are never firmly attributed to a particular sculpture but only to a specific place and for a predetermined period of time. The result of this working method is that there are no existent, finished sculptures to be seen in Magnusson's œuvre. Her installations are always created on the spot and with a strong reference to performance: "Only during the moment, in that place, when I decide that this is now a sculpture. A piece. The work emerges in that place. At that moment. In the situation. In an oscillating movement where work emerges and dissolves in new constellations."

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website