Malas Hierbas Anton Munar

Peres Projects is pleased to present Malas Hierbas, Anton Munar’s (b. 1997 in Copenhagen, DK) second solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Asia. This exhibition of works on canvas, paper and wood drawers, will be the artist’s first time showing drawings alongside paintings, as well as a video piece.

'Malas Hierbas' will be the first time I show my drawings and one of my video works. The drawings are in many ways the heart of my making, as it's how we all have our first experiences touching paper. Before writing and reading we create symbols at a small age: a drawn tree is all the trees in one. This last year I've been painting a lot outside in my parents garden, a place left to its own devices and after it has rained all the snails come out and keep me company. 

One of the things my day to day with these works has taught me is that; giving life to something comes with having to accept both ones lacking, and how that lacking will inevitably be imbued in ones making. And this is where the drawings come in, as a place for freedom and at once a place filled with ones lacking. In this regard they can often feel closer to life. On the other hand, for the paintings to attain this sense of being it mostly happens by giving them time, something which often leads to years of a painting being touched and left alone, to rest and grow in the shadows of my studio. 

I find it harder to write about the video work as they are often made very impulsively as a result of a conversation or certain situation that is then explored in collaboration with a loved one.  

The more I write the harder I realize this format is; as it can very quickly override the works and drift into meaninglessness. As so much of what I connect to in making and in the works of others comes from the unsaid,  I think I’ll stop here.

Written by Anton Munar

The Spanish term Malas Hierbas implies an arbitrary hierarchy of worthiness in, and perhaps even beyond the vegetal realm. Those semantics inspired in the artist a reflection on what can be a biased perception of the world around us, and how we may succumb to the urge to label certain things as undesirable, simply because they escape our understanding, or reveal our inability to interact with them. The works in Malas Hierbas are a visual reflection on the inadequacy and flaw which, by design, exists in all that is born, in all that lives and evolves, and ultimately disintegrates. 

Munar embraces the feeling of being out of place, this otherness which is just as giving as what is easily perceived as whole, or simple to grasp. He also finds subtle parallels between the transience inherent to the natural world and the impermanence of our human lives. The beings depicted in the artist’s works appear somewhere between the ghostly and the incarnate, often finding themselves merging with the surrounding trees, bodies of water or rock formations. 

Malas Hierbas is a meditation on the aliveness found in the fragile, and how this vulnerability, somehow holding both strength and fragility, also exists in the liminal space between birth and death, at the core of Anton Munar’s artistic reflection.

Munar, who received his MFA in Fine Arts from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2023, has had solo exhibitions at Brunette Coleman, London (2024) Painters Painting Paintings, St. Albans (2023), diez, Amsterdam (2022), and Galleri Q, Copenhagen (2020). His work has been presented in group exhibitions at Peres Projects, Seoul (2023), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2023), CASTLE, Los Angeles (2023), Peres Projects, Seoul (2023), Marie Kirkegaard Gallery, Copenhagen (2022), Claas Reiss, London (2021), Alice Folker, Copenhagen (2021), Indebt Studios, Amsterdam (2021), and The Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (2019), among others.