Tony Oursler - Face to Face

The exhibition 'Face to Face' is an encounter with New York-based video artist Tony Oursler's strange universe filled with odd characters - an encounter that also includes works created especially for the exhibition at ARoS.

Using humour as a tool, his artworks balance on the edge between fun and madness. Tony Oursler is known for incorporating both sculptural and performative elements in his work with the video medium, which he has been working intensively with since the late 1970s. Throughout the 1990s, he developed his own genre: He projected video onto various objects, creating strange puppets that could magically speak. This was a unique artistic approach that today characterises his many works - including, for example, the site-specific work Oursler created for the 9 Rooms at ARoS, Unk, in which a face is projected onto a large egg shape immersed in a pool of water.

Tony Oursler's video art thus differs from much other video art, as he leaves the traditional flat screen and instead leaps into advanced visual, performative and sound experiments, drawing inspiration from visual art, theatre and music.

Tony Oursler has become known for the way he combines the medium of video with a range of physical objects, such as puppets, furniture or organic forms cast in fibreglass, which are brought to life with a powerful visual and soundtrack as talking faces appear on the objects. Through the visual and auditory, Tony Oursler creates a magical, humorous and sometimes frightening form of life where dolls and other objects come to life. In this way, Tony Oursler's art fascinatingly balances humour and madness, sanity and schizophrenia.

Tony Oursler (b. 1957) lives and works in New York.