A monograph presenting selected works from the first ten years of the Danish artist's career, 2013 to 2023.
This publication includes new text contributions by the art historian Mathias Danbolt and the curator and art historian Jenny Graser, and a conversation between Fleckner and the scholar and curator Lex Morgan Lancaster.
Working from queer and trans epistemologies, Ester Fleckner (born 1983 in Denmark) inverts the value of failure, unfinishedness, and displacement to arrive at chaotic and intuitive ways of knowing. Fleckner employs an abstract aesthetic to counteract normative tendencies to produce ever new and false binaries. As such, Fleckner's ventures are almost always serial and expressly inquisitive; always morphing along the way towards no particular endpoint. The works can be read as alternative maps for navigating visual and linguistic representation out of rigid categorisation. Fleckner mostly works with woodcut printing—a simple, slow and physical technique that allows for differences, errors and a loss of control. As a natural material, wood is apt for Fleckner's exploration of the collisions between the body and various cultural norms. Fragments of text or drawing are often added in pencil as interaction or dialogue with the graphics works that are printed by the artist. Fleckner's practice expands from the woodcuts to include cast concrete sculptures, drawings, text work and performative readings.
