Covers 2 by Tore Svensson at Hannah Gallery

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Tore Svensson

At the exhibition at Hannah Gallery in 2020, Tore Svensson questioned the issue of how close a piece of art can be to another artist's work without becoming plagiarism, a problem that you can sometimes see in jewellery.

In the first exhibition, Covers Tore chose some works from various artists and translated them into brooches. 11 different works of art became 33 brooches. Most of them are made of steel, which is the material he mainly works with. The title of the exhibition they borrowed from the music world, Covers.

Tore explains: The same year Covid 19 started and everything closed down. I could not visit the opening in Barcelona and got stuck in Berlin for one year, neither could I work in my studio in Gothenburg.

I continued with the Cover-Series, but this time I chose only one artist, Andy Warhol and his image Flowers. I sawn the flowers in MDF and painted them with acrylic colors. For the backside, I made a silver circle with the mechanism. The picture from Warhol consists of 4 flowers in different shapes, I made nine variations in different colors of each flower.

When Andy Warhol made his project Flowers in silkscreen in 1964, he did not go out into nature to paint his beautiful flowers from what he observed there, instead, he used a photograph by Patricia Caulfield of hibiscus flowers that was published in an issue of the magazine Modern Photography. In 1966, the hibiscus photographer Caulfield sued Warhol. After using well-known trademarks as subjects for his art without consequence, a simple bunch of flowers opened a lawsuit.

Warhol and Caulfield settled out of court and it is said that his experiences with Caulfield led Warhol to only use his own photographs in the future.

When I made my Flower brooches, my approach was more of an interpretation of it and a tribute to another artist's artworks, than a simple copy, a Cover.
 

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