ENTANGLED_PAPERWORKS

  

  

Entangled_Paperworks
12.05 - 03.07.2020

We are very pleased to open the exhibition Entangled_Paperworks and get back to our normal opening hours.  The exhibition is open to the public and we will follow all necessary precautions according to the health regulations.

Our exhibition program has changed due to the Covid-19 outbreak and as a result of that, the exhibition by Tove Storch that was previously announced for May 2020 will now open August 26th, 2020.

The associative links between the works in the exhibition Entangled_Paperworks are legion, but common to them all is a return to the basic – but also fragile – point of departure in terms of material. The works in the exhibition can be appreciated for their processual insight, their intimacy, and direct approach – in drawings, we seek truth rather than power. Paper is at the root of the majority of artistic practices and their development; it is inextricably linked to the development process relative to new artistic departures. Paper is used for both registration and rationalisation. It may constitute a work and be used as currency. Paper is easily disseminated across national borders; it can be mass-produced and penetrate otherwise closed systems. Historically, paper is the very foundation of our information culture – and will survive its collapse. In times of crisis, we revert to essentials, we cut to the bone, and use what is at hand.

Gardar Eide Einarsson’s new work series The Plague Drawings, all made in Tokyo during state of exception caused by the corona virus pandemic, uses as its indirect point of departure the present global situation by referring to Albert Camus’s literary principal work The Plague. Thus, Einarsson’s works on paper are based on the various book covers for the novel, which outlines a battle between humanism and cynicism – between idealism and political pragmatism. The original book covers produced over time are, in Einarsson’s works, reduced to modernist abstractions. The conceptual approach is the pivotal point in Einarsson’s practice, which addresses the tradition of new artistic departures – especially perhaps recalling Robert Rauschenberg’s iconic work Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). By extracting all text and photographic elements from the book covers, Einarsson’s compositions put us in mind of open window sections. With all other information removed the work reclaims an abstraction originally conceived in painting and repurposes it as painting again, filling the void left by the missing referents with a new meaning. Both artistic approaches create value by erasing something significant, thereby making space for new meaning.

In the work series The Geography of Hunger, Runo Lagomarsino uses an electric oven and baking paper where parts of the paper are covered prior to warming it up. Apart from the practical function of this overlooked and everyday material, it harbours an integral political narrative. The oven as something’s in our closest environment; An art form which can be produced at home, in isolation, and at no cost. In The Geography of Hunger – Map, Lagomarsino has cut a stencil shaped like the Latin American continent; a burned drawing, a burned map, highlighting the colonial heritage of contemporary Latin America and the conflicts that are constitutive of colonial borders. In The Geography of Hunger – Map, Lagomarsino continues his interest in paperworks where light, mobility and fragility are at the core of the production of the actual work. Earlier, Lagomarsino was known for his ’sun drawings’ e.g. created during a voyage across the Atlantic. The visual content was transferred to paper via the effect of sunlight and the rigging of the sailing boat. By leaving the medium at the mercy of nature and the elements, Lagomarsino exposes the frailty of the material – but also its resistance to time and chance. Lagomarsino applies a similar approach in the work That song is our amulet whose title refers to an actual passage in the story Amulet by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. This literary grounding once again calls to mind the Latin American continent and its political conflicts. This is further supported by the shape, reminiscent of a fist while also tracing the contour of Latin America.

Like Lagomarsino’s travel notes, Eduardo Terrazas’s work is reminiscent of a geographical map. The meticulously drawn lines in coloured pencil form offshoots across the paper like coordinates. Entitled Constellations 16.34, the abstract form of the work is reminiscent of constellations on a clear night sky, at once present and absent. Rather than locating a specific navigation, his drawing tends perhaps to express an intuitive journey into the universe – through one’s inner self. Thus, Terrazas also maps a cosmic order, meditating on nature’s evolution of those micro and macro systems that constitute man’s basis of existence.

The idea of an organic presence is further bolstered by Michael Kvium’s works where anatomical abstractions dangle like innards or curtain cords. The works have a mutual serial rhythm due to the manner in which the wet colour spreads across the paper. In keeping with the works from the exhibition Papirvirus (Paper Virus) from 1988, the message is the force of nature and man’s moral character. In this way, the works create a tension between what we expect from the realm of a picture and what this actually represents to Kvium.

Man’s frailty resonates in Tove Storch’s work in which the fragile paper quivers in the pressure exerted by the weight of the iron slats, perhaps reminding us of an inner entanglement of memory. On the paper, the lines extend into an abstract and only partly visible drawing, attesting to physical presence and processual movement.

The bodily theme is also present in the series of coloured pencil drawings Celebrity Pet by Carlos Amorales. The same dynamic silhouette drawing seems to be repeated endlessly, at times forming a figure with several breasts, arms, and legs.

In spite of their seemingly non-figurative character, the two drawings by FOS’ has a similar bodily feel to them. As they appear side by side, they could be seen as one - and they are in fact based on a well-known sculptural principle in the artist's practice. FOS’ work is often centred around the idea of the images as ‘a double skin’ - an image that, when repeated, appears to be more physical than surface-orientated.

Finally, the temporal aspect is represented in Ingvar Cronhammar’s work Seven minutes past four, referencing the time when night becomes day and a new twenty-four-hour period begins. The black monochrome plane of the paper is only broken by two diagonal lines forming a clock face in memory of nature’s cycle.

This exhibition presents paper-based works by the artists: Gardar Eide Einarsson, Runo Lagomarsino, Eduardo Terrazas, FOS, Michael Kvium, Tove Storch, Carlos Amorales, and Ingvar Cronhammar.

 

 

 

MICHAEL KVIUM

 

 

Michael Kvium
Pale Male Tales
18.01 - 07.03.2020

Michael Kvium opens the first solo exhibition at NILS STÆRK with a pitiless portrayal of the folly of man, covering every nook and cranny of life. The stage is set and the curtain raised for a tragicomic rendition of the present-day white male and the political challenges facing contemporary life.

A persistently powerful expression has characterised the artist’s oeuvre from his first performance and video experiments in the 1980s until the present where he unceasingly and critically questions the rise and fall of Western civilisation. The exhibition Pale Male Tales addresses current political issues, confronting us with various portrayals of the white, pale male through two large-scale and a series of seven medium-sized paintings. The figure seven recurs throughout the exhibition – seven stripes form the background in each of the seven works, seven portrayals of the white male type, seven aspects of the mind. Placed next to the paintings lies the bronze sculpture Socialkreds (Social Circle) at the centre of the gallery space as a stage open to viewers. 

Since Kvium graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-eighties, his distinctive character sketches have left indelible marks on art history and in viewers’ minds. The narrative paintings are set on a stage between curtain rise and curtain fall, like the progression of life from birth to death. The works evoke a paradoxical mood between exuberance and disgust, coming to rest in an expression between realism and abstraction virtually impossible to shake off. This insisting obtrusion into our visual memory is Kvium’s hallmark. The Pale Male Tales portrayals stick in the minds of viewers, providing a context for an, at times, unpleasant recollection of our own behaviour. 

Michael Kvium’s (b.1955) works have been shown at a number of solo and group exhibitions at art institutions at home and abroad, most recently at the Gropius Bau Berlin, Kunsthal Rotterdam, and formerly at the Arken Museum of Modern Art, ARoS Art Museum, Kunsthalle Göppingen, the Red Brick Museum Beijing, the Today Art Museum, Beijing, and Schenzhen Guan Shanyue Art Museum to mention but a few.

 

MATTHEW RONAY

 

 

Matthew Ronay
Polypastoraline
28.08 - 19.10.2019

Nils Stærk is pleased to present our fifth solo exhibition with American artist Matthew Ronay. The exhibition Polypastoraline presents 11 new basswood sculptures - all in a vibrant, abstract language that carries a rich variation of references.

The title is an invented word and reflects the main idea of the exhibition. Polypastoraline is constructed of (poly-) many + (pastoral) relating to rural life + (-ine) denoting of or pertaining to.

Since antiquity, the theme of the Pastorale has been used in poetry, music, and art to evoke a place or state of mind that embodies the rapture of an undisturbed, peaceful landscape. From the frescoes of Pompeii, to the classical strains of Beethoven’s symphonies and the idealized landscapes of Claude and Poussin, the pastoral subject was used to evoke harmony, reverie and serenity. Over time, as the natural world has become increasingly soiled by human intervention, the ethos expressed by the pastorale has aquired darker connotations, where dismay and a sense of loss loom large over the demise of bucolic sanctity. And given the increasingly rapid pace of toxic climate change, the emergence of new paradigms for thematizing nature is inevitable.

Polypastoraline takes this shift as its point of departure, with objects that reimagine what the Pastorale might signify many generations in the future. If traditional examples of natural beauty are no longer relevant, what might their progeny look like? The detritus of the constructed environment from decaying technologies to new organisms born from a polluted gene pool, forms the backbone of the syntax used in the 11 sculptures presented as encapsulating the exhibition.

The reading of the sculptures are a remembrance of analog technologies - rendered in a bright palette of colors that alternates between warmth, desolation, discomfort and joy. The otherwise abstract works are composed of sinuous forms that emulate the grasping of polluted air, a figure reclining in highly surveilled terrain, caged organisms, intelligent plant life, and mutated musical instruments, radar arrays and antennae. Thus, the utopias they encapsulate are both welcoming and horrific, peaceful and disruptive, pristine and diseased.

Matthew Ronay (b. 1976, Louisville, KY) lives in New York. In 2016, his work was the subject of solo- presentations at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, with a fully-illustrated catalogue published on the occasion. He has exhibited extensively at major institutions worldwide, including: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY; Kunstverein Lingen, Germany; University of Louisville, KY; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; Serpentine Gallery, London; SculptureCenter, New York; and Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London. Ronay participated in the 2013 Lyon Biennale, curated by Gunnar Kvaran, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His works are in private and public collections, including: Kistefos Museum, Norway; ARoS Art Museum, Denmark; Astrup Fearnley, Norway; Dallas Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, MoMA New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

 

WUNDERKAMMER

Wunderkammer
Group Show 
Until 20.12.2019
 
Nils Stærk presents the curated group show 'Wunderkammer'.
 
 

 

RESOLUTION OF TIME AND SPACE

Resolution of time and space
Summer show
24.07 – 16.08.2019

FOS, Carlos Amorales, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Lea Porsager, Ingvar Cronhammar, Mads Gamdrup

We connect to our surroundings in time and space, and through the objects we surround us with we constitute a link between language, action and our body. At the Summer show we invite you in to the space - to take a seat at the center object by FOS. The Hesitation Bench- a social space and generous furniture with no front or back. A space where you invite someone else into your private space and create a place to talk, feel and watch the works by the gallery artists that surround you.  

Carlos Amorales’ black and white abstract painting based on the French Calendar – a calendar in system and order with no religious or royalist influences. Through Amorales pictograms it appears dissolved and in disorder.

Seven minutes past four – the moment where the night meets the day, where the sleep is at the deepest and where the nightmares are most real captured in a serigraphic print by Danish artist Ingvar Cronhammar.

Minimal and reduced to form and color, Gardar Eide Einarsson’s works belong to a series based on book covers. David Hicks on Bathrooms– a book where the author underlines his believes in being present in a space that enchances our sense of beauty and ourselves.

On a hotbed in steel with eight lacquered resin Natal CrittersLea Porsager creates a cosmic feeling – with a reference to Ovartaci’s female body shaped pipes, which he smoke believering the inhaling of the smoke from the female body would bring him closer to cosmos.

An almost dissolved colored space appear in Mads Gamdrup’s hand rolled glass works with a red handpainted and almost disappearing cosmic circle.

 

Wishing you a warm Summer and look forward seeing you at the gallery!