06.07.2012 - 17.07.2012

It is with great pleasure that we present a selection of works by the gallery’s artists for our summer show 2012. The group show consists of works by ten artists, with a range of mediums including sculpture, video and photography. This is the first time that the works have been presented together or in the gallery itself.

The exhibition does not carry an overall theme and the works instead present themselves in a number of ways, specifically chosen in order to let the viewer discover connections and meanings. The conviction behind this choice being that an overall theme reduces the meaning of the individual works, and thereby prevents the viewer from having a nuanced experience of the art. The works are presented in an immediately incoherent instalment however the juxtaposition of the works shapes an overall theme through the visitor’s experience of the show in its entirety. Below are listed possible conceptual links and thematic traces which we wish for the viewer to interpret as and how they will.

In the show you can experience Mads Gamdrup’s large photographic work Denmark in Transition. The work is an interpretation of the representation of the Danish landscape of today. Clear landscapes are mixed with misty, indefinable ones that discuss the question of national identity and the anchoring of it in landscape.

This question of identity and its complex structure is underlined in Miriam Bäckström’s video installation Kira Carpelan. The video follows an art student, Kira Carpelan, and her preparations for a hypothetical exhibition by the artist Bäckström – an exhibition commissioned by Bäckström herself. Behind the camera is the real Bäckström.

Olaf Breuning’s photographs of mysterious and grotesque persons also closely relate to the theme of staged identity. Breuning’s portraits contain parallels to Michael Kvium’s performance videos Black and White where we see monstrous characters performing comic, macabre and meaningless acts.

In the work FREE BEER/COUNTER GAME STRATEGIES/DISTRIBUTION MACHINE by SUPERFLEX it is the audience who obtain a false identity as they can assume the role of the owner of either a commercial or micro brewing company. The game exceeds the limitations of the gallery space and comments on the actual terms of the market in a playful and humorous manner.

This chain of possible connections and meanings can be continued and negotiated by the viewer through their interactions with the show.

ORGANISCHES DETAIL UND LÄRM

27.10 – 15.12 2012

It is our pleasure to present Mads Gamdrup’s 4th solo exhibition at the gallery. It is the first time Gamdrup is presenting his work in the space on Ny Carlsberg Vej 68, in which he revises the traditional landscape motif with 18 new photographical pieces.

How do we experience the landscape today? How does this experience affect our perception of ourselves? And how does this self-concept change in different social contexts?

Once again Gamdrup will try to answer these questions by taking the photographical medium to its limit, where the motif slowly dissolves into a mere abstraction only to be recreated into something one could call an experienced landscape. This is not a nostalgic retrospect, but a reflection on what landscape as motif and experience means to us humans.

In Gamdrup’s works the landscape acts as a narrative figure for the social context we find ourselves in. Therefore the landscape as motif is more the point of departure for a conversation about social relations rather than a desire of recreating the landscape documentarily.

The pieces at the exhibition are divided    into 3 groups each with their own photographic characteristic: Five abstract noise-pieces, one straight photography piece and twelve silk screen prints. Each of these three different expressions refers to Gamdrup’s earlier work. In the context of each other they create a new and complex space that enables the understanding of the photographical media, the landscape, the colour and the material element.

The motifs reflect in each other and by that offer the audience a possible experience of the landscape as a human construction. Gamdrup perceives art as a social space where one is confronted with ones own actions. And just by that physical presence of the art together with its surrounding context it will create a basis for self-reflexivity.

That self-reflexivity is ever-present in Gamdrup’s exhibition with the basic but urgent question of representing something. From the small realistic photo to the silkscreen prints and the big abstract colour formations. What is most recognizable?,Perhaps the juxtaposition of these different expressions offers a more complete idea of how we perceive our own reality?

The question of representation does not only involve art, but revolves foremost around how we perceive ourselves and are being perceived by others.

IT COMES IN WAVES

01.09. - 20.10.2012

We are very pleased to present Matthew Ronay’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. It will be the first time Ronay exhibits in our new space at Ny Carlsberg Vej 68, where his exhibition It Comes In Waves will fill out the entire gallery.

Matthew Ronay’s sculptural works are like mythological visions that embrace the mystical and strange without loosing the ability to impact the viewer on a fundamentally human level. Ronay works with humble materials such as wood, papier mâché and fabric and sets forth oppositions such as male/female; life/death; light/darkness; and reality/unreality. Both formally and as regards to content Ronay’s artistic universe is informed by the spirituality and design of some non-western cultures as well as the cosmology of science fiction. His interest in rites and ceremony is expressed in his works that often have talisman-like features. Oftentimes Ronay ‘activates’ his works by performing at his exhibitions, where he transfers his energy to the works and infuses them with vitality.

Inspired by the psychoanalytic Carl Jung and the mythologist Joseph Cambell Ronay works with his intuition in order to reach an expression that reach us at a fundamental and collective unconscious level. His enigmatic sculptures and stagings engender a strange remembrance of something primal and instinctively original that lies deeply buried in the consciousness of modern man.

At the exhibition It Comes in Waves Matthew Ronay and his wife will perform at the opening on August 31st.

AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY

19.01.2013 - 02.03.2013

Nils Stærk is pleased to announce the exhibition American Photography with ten new works by Los Angeles based artist Torbjørn Rødland. This is Rødland’s fourth solo-presentation at the gallery.

In making and combining photographs, Rødland’s practice is a subversive one. Familiar images and motifs are tapped for intuitive internal connections and mythological connotations – this often leads to hybrid genres.

With its willfully generic title, this new collection of photographs builds a loose but symbolically saturated weave of culturally recognizable and sometimes stolen visuals from American politics, nature and religion.

Most of the photographed surfaces are flat, hard and pale: an Arizona canyon, a gravestone, marble chips in stucco, a foam roller, ceramic tiles, asphalt and concrete.

The Great Seal of the United States at the facade of Beijing’s U.S. embassy is photographed head on and in colour while three smaller silver gelatine prints focus on key scenes relating to the murder of John F. Kennedy.

Six crumpled white napkins photographed on messy terrace tiles reveal, on closer inspection, the Reagan Coat of Arms appropriated as a green pub logo.

Propaganda posters from the 1980 U.S. presidential election, one from each of the two main political parties, are physically interrupted and re-photographed.

A photograph of a Joshua tree, so named by a group of Mormon settlers who crossed the Californian desert in the mid-19th century, is juxtaposed with a picture of the majestic twin towers of the San Diego Mormon Temple.

Rødland’s practice interrogates commercial photography and its longing for and representation of authenticity alongside certain overfamiliar tropes bound to contemporary visual culture. While mainly concerned with the visualization and ambiguity of moral conflicts and issues both personal and collective, Torbjørn Rødland isolates and revisits these persistent American tropes.

Torbjørn Rødland was born in Stavanger, Norway in 1970. He studied at the National College of Art and Design, Bergen and Rogaland University Centre, Stavanger. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and the US at venues such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the 48th Venice Biennale, Venice; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Reina Sofa Museum, Madrid, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Vanilla Partner recently published by MACK (London), has been selected for TIME Magazine’s Best of 2012 and New York Times’ top-10 photo books of the year.

Torbjørn Rødland lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.