Biography

For around a decade now, Axel Antas’s photography, drawings, films and evanescent sculptures have inventively revolved around attempts to grasp and engage with the natural world (though this subject, as we’ll see, can be capsuled within a larger set of concerns). They’re paradoxical works, succeeding through evoking frustrated efforts, unbridgeable distances.

What is evident in this work, first, is the desire for communing, merging with the natural: something one also sees in Antas’s drawings. In 2006, he began making hard-pencilled images of trees, tribute-like images whose detail takes a while to emerge, as the details of the Whiteout works also do