Art Fairs

When I started to mix paint, one of my first hard-won experiences was trying to observe nature and paint it. No one thing is a single color. One field is never just one but many. The crown of a tree is not only green but a myriad of different greens, as well as hundreds of small interruptions, often too small to see or notice, let alone paint. But one notices the absence. The absence of those interruptions and broken-up surface. I use the language of landscape painting. The formats, the paint, and the application of the paint and colors. But the shapes painted are simplified, unspecific, geographic, abstract, and somewhat arbitrary. Leaving a space between the language of depiction and what is actually pictured. In other words, painting a non- specific graphic form with a pictorial language traditionally used for figurative landscape painting. The surface is broken with thick brushstrokes and textures. I put a lot of old dry paint into the paint of the smaller works, making the surface topographical and geological. This makes the monochrome surface less static and even less monochromatic. Structured paint also makes the painting more material. The physical form of the immaterial image is very material and reveals its construction, showing the traces of its own production."

- Paul Fägerskiöld

In his stained glass paintings, Mads Gamdrup examines the transparency and texture of colors. In both the monochrome and the multicolored paintings, Gamdrup works to create a space where the colors and differences in the texture of the glass are challenged by the painted circles. In the relationship between the glass and the painted circles, space is created in itself - and another space is created when the individual works are part of a serial context. This gives the pictorial expression a spatiality to use diversity as a quality - and opens up for individual interpretations.

Terrazas broad artistic production includes works as heterogeneous as his most iconic series Possibilities of a Structure (1974 - ) with it subseries: Cosmos, Nine Circles, Diagonals, Grid and Bar Code, a pictorial investigation of the characteristics that allows an specific structure be developed and transformed to the infinite. Terrazas work serves as a testimony of his interest in thinking in an interdisciplinary way to establish visions of our contemporary world through universal visual languages. Image after image his work seems to tell stories of the geometry underlining our Cosmos.

Euphoria Now is an ongoing series of paintings based on colour schemes of global currencies. Starting in 2016 with the seven colours of the euro notes. The paintings now exists in several versions to mark the many different currencies and economies that constitute our global market. To mention a few : Euro, US Dollars, Chinese Yuan, Singapore Dollars, Pound Sterling and Austrailian Dollars. ⁠

The conceptual starting point for the Euphoria Now paintings was the discovery of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s Dream Machine (1958/95). By looking at a series of flickering lights various colour patterns would appear and create a hypnagogic hallucination - supposedly encouraging artistic production. By directly referring to the colours of currencies, SUPERFLEX transferred the concept of the dream machine into contemporary society’s greatest hypnagogic hallucination of all: money.⁠

The work Bank of America, by Gardar Eide Einarsson, is a geometric, seemingly abstract painting. The composition is based on the logo of Bank of America which is in itself a simplified version of the American flag. Rendered in all red on a white background (rather than the red, white and blue of the original logo) the work references classic post-war painting from Frank Stella to Jasper Johns while at the same time the drips of red paint allude to the complicity of financial institutions like Bank of America in the repression and violence that runs below (and sometimes above) the surface of modern capitalism.

FOS’ artistic practice is characterized by a fascination for creating social scenarios that rely on human interaction to come to life between room, object and viewer. His work has throughout time circled around and questioned what constitutes a sociality and his explorations with language. FOS uses his objects as a tool to create a functional frame. He leads us on a journey through a set of frames, where the material is processed and continues becoming an object or a language that we in connection with one-another, create a relationship around. The untitled wall object makes use of natural materials like salt, water and oxygen - together they create a chemical reaction and as the water evaporates drips of colors are added and a crystallized landscape of salt appear.⁠

Swiss artist Olaf Breuning is known for his impressive large scale sculptures and his ironic views on a reality that is shaped by the media. Breuning works in a large range of media from photography, video, drawing and installation – common is the use of a shared visual language and mix symbols from the world of pop and the media with icons of high culture. Somewhere between humor and a seriousness, they make us aware of our consumerism, Western stereotypes and gender clichés and analyses the relationship between art and kitsch, reality and illusion, authenticity and artificiality.

Michael Kvium’s almost medieval representation of an extravagated main character could resemble a hellish figurative detail from a Flemish Renaissance painting. A narrative that is highlighted by the format.
Kvium's body of work contain a depth comparable with that of the human mind. Kviums figures and situations often remind of situations we recognise, either within ourselves or others. Therefore, Kvium's paintings can be considered narrative, telling a story about both the art world and the human interior.

Torbjørn Rødland's photographs are produced through film-based cameras and chemical processing. His self-aware and often uncanny photographs, films, and books are saturated with symbolism, lyricism, and eroticism. They take on existing visual forms and genres from still lives to portraits to landscapes, but without the research tone of first-wave conceptual art or the ironic commentary of the subsequent Pictures Generation. Attempts to seize and to integrate truth, rather than to deconstruct it, accompany Rødland's inclination to delve into problematic aspects of contemporary photography and the history of art. He probes popular visual languages in search of both spiritual and perverse qualities, so as to prolong our engagement with the single and the moving image.

In Gert & Uwe Tobias' paintings traditional folk image- making skills, such as carving and hand printing, are given a twist, and put through the filter of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Their exaggerated imagery, at turns abstract, geometric, fantastic and eerily animistic, draw on such diverse sources as popular culture, traditional Eastern European folk art, and art historical movements like Constructivism. Tobias create a body of work that is both playful and haunting.

A master of light in the photographic tradition, Sandberg worked exclusively within the medium of black-and-white photography and continued throughout his life creating his characteristic analog artworks with its rich grey tones and tonalities in the darkroom. Always on the move with his camera tied to his hand, Sandberg explored the surface and depth ratio in a motif to build both ambiguous and recognizable complex reality. Retrieving his modest, yet majestic images within the photographic classical genres such as clouds, people on the street, the female nude, airplanes, and landscapes, including more abstract subject matter, Sandberg’s remarkable poetic vision is imbued with a strong sense of presence and mystery.

Tom Sandberg
Untitled, 2010
Silver bromide print framed with museum glass
52 x 40,5 cm (20,47 x 15,94 in)
Edition #1/6

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Darío Escobar
Mensajes Cifrados No. 04, 2020
Metal, gold and pigments
70 x 59 x 39 cm (27,56 x 23,23 x 15,35 in)

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Jone Kvie
Meteor (M181119), 2019
Marble dust, jesmonite
29 cm (11,42 in)
1AP, Edition of 3, 1AP (each in unique color)

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Contact

Nils Stærk, nils@nilsstaerk.dk

Laura Goldschmidt, Laura@nilsstaerk.dk

Nina Nørreby, Nina@nilsstaerk.dk