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David Lamelas has been hailed as a pioneer within conceptual art, and the exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus will take a closer look at how he examines time, space, and language, which are three of his main preoccupations. At a time when artistic strategies routinely include conceptual approaches, it seems natural to delve more closely into the oeuvre of an artist such as Lamelas. In the Nordic countries, conceptual art has traditionally found its home in more low-key venues such as artist-run projects, journals, and small presses, and it has only rarely been distributed through the more mainstream channels of the art world. The foreword of the Swedish journal OEI' s 'KONC KONS' edition describes this is ... as a sort of amnesia, one that occurred early on and that has prevailed in subsequent expositions and exhibitions in the Nordic countries.

The works of David Lamelas may also be said to be the unwitting victims of such amnesia, or blindness perhaps, something that may explain why his works are primarily known within an international context. Lamelas, who was born and raised in Argentina, achieved his breakthrough at the Venice Biennale in 1968 with Office of Information a bout the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text and Audio, a work that will be recreated this year at MoMA in New York and incorporated in their collection. One of the spectators who discovered Lamelas at the Biennale was the artist Marcel Broodthaers, who introduced him to the gallery Wide White Space in Antwerp. It was there that Lamelas became a part of a group of celebrated conceptual artists who were active in Europe at the time, including Lawrence Weiner and Panamarenko. His affiliation to this group resulted in a nomadic artistic existence with sojourns in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, London, and Paris.

David Lamelas is generally associated with the structuralist films and multimedia installations that he produced in the 1960s and 1970s following his arrival in Europe. In these iconic projects, Lamelas queries the temporality of art as well as its capacity to increase visitors' awareness and highlight their roles as viewers and participants. Kunstnernes Hus has chosen to focus on works that emphasize the artist's examinations of the span between documentary and fiction, his experimental, interdisciplinary projects in the intersection between image and text, and his groundbreaking, cinematic studies of time and space. The exhibition will also showcase two sculptural installations that contrast architectural incision with immaterial articulation.