03.09.2011 - 22.10.2011

Ideal / Ein Gespräch

Ideal / Ein Gespräch is the result of a series of conversations between Cronhammar and Stræde, who – in spite of great differences in artistic expression and approach – have several common fields of references. The exhibition presents two imposing sculptures placed on the same surface, in the same zone.

Ingvar Cronhammar’s works place themselves in the field between architecture, art, and design, and these affinities are evident in the work We saw that didn’t we, on which a small city raises from the surface of a massive, red sculpture. The work reveals Cronhammar’s fascination of the industrial, and throughout the creation process the possibilities of technology are utilized to its full potential. We saw that didn’t we incites to slow-paced thoughtfulness, but underneath the surface lurks an unease in the realization of recognizing something one has never before seen.

Morten Stræde’s sculpture Geist is an anthropomorphic figure whose acute angles are inspired by the American bomber ’Spirit’. The airplane is characteristic as it is invisible on the radar due to its special angles, and the plane is thus simultaneously physically present and invisible. From an aesthetic point of view the high technological machine is extremely beautiful, and in a fascination of the beautiful in the horrific, Stræde extracts this ’sublime’ feature and give it a body. A body that reaches toward a sky that is projected back onto the sculpture, so that baroque cloud formations intermix with the sculpture’s sharp and almost futuristic aesthetic.

Ideal – Ein Gespräch has previously been on display at Vendsyssel Museum of Art, and will travel to the Funen Art Museum November 2011. The exhibition comprises a catalogue with text by Anders Troelsen.

JONE KVIE

MATTER OF REFLECTIONS

13.01 – 03.03.2012

The exhibition Matter of Reflections presents four new works by Jone Kvie. The works that are placed on the floor, the walls and hung from the gallery ceiling all contain references to celestial bodies. The scientific references are recurrent at the exhibition that in an attempt to materialize and insist on the enigma of the universe simultaneously accentuates mans alienation and powerlessness in the meeting with nature.When large celestial bodies are moved into the gallery space for beholding and scrutiny, human desire to make nature subject to measurements and empirical findings are brought into focus. In Kvies works this scientific approach is given equal status to the romantic idea of the sublime, in which man is overwhelmed by a feeling of impotence in the meeting with nature. Jone Kvie is repeatedly able to convey this dualism in his works in which insistence on and analysis of corporeal phenomenons reveal them as mysterious and enigmatic.There is a striking discrepancy between the large sculptures and the viewer, who seems incomparably small in relation. This discrepancy emphasizes the experience of the work, which thematizes mans fear, powerlessness and fascination with phenomenons he cannot control. Confronted with Jone Kvies sculptures, the viewer fails to control the object and is caught in an experience extended between the finite and the infinite.Jone Kvie (1971) has during the last years exhibited at The National Museum, Oslo, Norway; Bergen Museum of Art, Norway; Galerie Mark Müller, Switzerland; Krannert Art Museum, Illinois; The Beijing Biennial; Kunsti Museum of Modern Art, Finland; The Wanås Foundation, Sweden; Charro Negro Galeria, Mexico; I – 20 Gallery, New York.

OTHERWHERE

28.10.2011 - 17.12.2011

TAIL TO TAIL

16.03.2012 - 05.05.2012

Tail to Tail is Michael Kvium’s first solo exhibition at Nils Stærk. The exhibition consists of new oil paintings and works on paper.

Since the paintings and performances of the 1980’s Michael Kvium’s works have focused on uncompromising descriptions of the aspects of life that we rather hide than expose to observation. In recent years Kvium’s grotesque and perverted depictions of the human body are companied by beautiful landscapes and animal motives. The general theme still remains life and the double character of horror and redemption that death represents in comparison. Death acts as a constant presence in Kvium’s works, reminding us of the paradoxical consequence of conception.

Michael Kvium’s painterly stagings contain associations to a theatre stage. As a theater plays a story that unfolds in the interval between the curtain rise and fall, human life unfolds between life and death. It is this interval Michael Kvium holds focus on.

In the large-scale two-piece work Tail to Tail on display at Nils Stærk, the viewer is confronted with two figures on a monochrome background. One is dressed in a cardinal’s red dress and headpiece and points towards the sky. The other wears a judge’s black gown and wig and points horizontally out of the painting. Out of each figure’s back grows a tail. The two tails meet in the centre point between the two canvases, thus combining them. Tail to Tail is at once a merciless, disturbing, grotesque and ironic comment on the power structures and stories we submit ourselves to. The cardinal, the judge, and also the nun are characters that Kvium investigates in his new works. It is a common trait of these characters that they traditionally refer to a meaning that transcends the Western ideals. Instead, Kvium’s works reveal them as grotesque symbols, stressing staging as a fundamental condition of human existence. The painting’s transmission of mistrust towards the authorities we are surrounded by, takes on the character of a political statement. The judge and the cardinal’s clothes, and the meaning they bear reference to, become undermined when they are reduced to props or costumes. Even the cardinal laughs scornfully at those who think to find meaning in the direction his finger points. In Michael Kvium’s works meaning rather seems to have its source in the body itself when bodies are connected and act in closed circuits and systems.

In the works Interrupted Sky Piece I and Interrupted Sky Piece II the same issue is at stake, but in a different context. These are virtuoso paintings whose visual language is placed far from the aesthetics of ugliness Michael Kvium is often associated with. Beautiful cloud formations are penetrated by leafless treetops inhabited by black birds that watch toward the horizon. The infinite and enigmatic sky seems challenged by the trees’ dead branches that appear as reminders of all life’s ending.

The worldview confronting the spectator in Michael Kvium’s works evokes a paradoxical feeling of horror and fascination of the hideous and of nothingness. But the fear of emptiness and the lack of meaning or being create the foundation of a sublime redemption in the experience of his works.