KENDALL KOPPE is delighted to present Kris Lemsalu’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Rinky Dink Babe. Lemsalu’s practice is a multidisciplinary concoction of ideas, anecdotes, forms and personal histories experienced via a community of collaborators, artists and friends. Traditionally working across a range of media, Lemsalu merges sculpture, installation and performance in a universe that fuses animal and human, nature with artifice, beauty with repulsion, lightness with gravity and life with death.

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Ricky Dink Babe is Lemsalu’s first exhibition that features her vivid watercolour works on paper. Painted between the studio and en plein air, each scene is a rip-roaring combination of genre painting with equal part visions and representations of both realised and unrealised installations. For Lemsalu, the veil between life and art are blurred, inextricably tangled, one never far from the other. She is currently producing her first feature film which will premiere at Tartu Museum, Tallinn in spring 2024. Micro Granny 2 is a new performance with Lemsalu and collaborator Noriko Okaku. The happening will be durational throughout the preview of Rinky Dink Babe. Please feel free to dance and celebrate if the moment takes you. The exhibition also features a response from artist Sue Tompkins, available on the gallery’s limited riso-poster handout.

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Kris Lemsalu (b.1985, Tallinn) lives and works in Tallinn and New York. Recent solo exhibitions and performances include: Rinkly Dink Babe, Kendall Koppe; Glasgow; Peace @ 295 Church Street, Margot Samel, New York, NY (2022); Angels Gone Pissing, Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn, EE (2022); A Snail’s Tale with Kyp Malone, High Line Art, New York, US (2021); Going Going with Kyp Malone, Den Frie, Copenhagen, DK (2020); Love Song Sing-Along with Kyp Malone, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, DE (2020); Love Song Sing Along (Once Again With Feeling!), with Kyp Malone, Kai Art Center, Tallinn, EE (2020), Keys Open Doors, Secession, Vienna, AT (2018); 4LIFE, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, UK (2018); The Wild Ones, Koppe Astner, Glasgow, UK (2017–2018). Selected group exhibitions include: Airing Dirty Laundry with Kyp Malone, 7th Athens Biennale: Eclipse, Athens, GR (2021); Diversity United. Contemporary European Art, Moscow–Berlin–Paris, Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn, DE (2021); Human After All, Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics, Leeuwarden, NL (2020); Up to and Including Limits, Muzeum Susch, Zürich, CH (2019); Metamorphosis. Art in Europe Now, Fondation Cartier, Paris, FR (2019); There and Back Again, curated by Kati Kivinen and Saara Hacklin, Kiasma, Helsinki, FI (2018); Steps to Aeration, curated by Sarah McCrory, Tanya Leighton, Berlin, DE (2018); and The Hierophant, curated by Aaron Moulton; Metamorphosis, curated by Zdenek Felix and presented at KAI 10 / Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, DE. Lemsalu represented Estonia in the 58th Venice Biennale (2019)

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Noriko Okaku (b.1979, Kyoto) lives and works in London and Kyoto. Okaku is a media artist specialising in Animation. Screened and exhibited at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Ottawa animation film festival; Museum of Royal Ueno, Tokyo among others. Most recently at the 21st Century Museum Kanazawa as part of 21+ project. Okaku was named as one of ‘5 female animation artists, by DIOR for their 2021 AW collection, and recently completed artist residency in Katurao Collective, Fukushima where the nuclear reactor accident occurred in 2011.

 

Sue Tompkins (b. 1971, Leighton Buzzard) lives and works in Glasgow. Working with fragments of language gathered from everyday encounters and experiences, Tompkins’ practice incorporates text, sound, installation, painting and performance. Recent exhibitions and performances include; Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg; Lydgalleriet, Bergen; Tenderbooks, London; The Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow at Glasgow International; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Inverleith House, Edinburgh; Spike Island, Bristol; and Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. She has presented performances and been included in numerous group exhibitions including those at: Sonar2018, Barcelona; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Tate Britain, London; mumok, Vienna; Tramway, Glasgow; BBC Scotland, Glasgow, White Columns, New York; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; the 29th São Paolo Biennale, São Paolo; the British Art Show 7 at the Hayward Gallery, London and touring; MACBA, Barcelona; ICA and the Tate Modern, London; and Artists Space, New York.Tompkins was shortlisted for the Beck’s Futures Prize in 2006 and received the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2011. Kris and Sue met on Easter in Berlin.