Month: March 2008

Beautiful and awesome, the master have did it again….
Faurschou

“The show is about how I am 39 years old and how all this time went into making right now. The pictures in the show start at age 24 and go to age 39 at 6pm on March 8th, 2008. It is about human communication dealing with dealing through paint. It is about personal mind control as a coping mechanism to be better at co-existence. About language to communicate in order to know of serenity. It is about cancer, death. Life. Serenity. Life. Order. Chaos. Recycle. Health food. Life. Bright colors not to draw an insect to a flame to be harmed but show possibility. Its about unfinished business and the inability to do everything. All things. Endless choices. Serenity there. Animal, plant, insect. The main reason I had to do this is this is my daily ritual to make pictures is to contemplate life and death, world and place is part of my religion. It is true. I believe. Sooner or later both ways all the time.” — Chris Johanson

Chris Johanson was born in 1968 in San Jose, California, and currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon. His work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and Europe, including recent shows at the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, and Galerie Georg Kargl in Vienna, Austria. In 2002, Johanson’s work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and in 2003 he received a SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Jack Hanley

Utydelige tegninger
Fotografier af Bersang & Saugmann

Galleri Signe Vad

Scott Anderson Misiisto

Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present Misiisto by Chicago-based artist Scott Anderson. Anderson, who is best known for his abundant imagery depicting places that nod to surrealism while utilizing the picture-plane as an adaptable space where fictional narrative shifts its weight with the process of painting. Anderson’s latest body of work blends a world of speculative-fiction, fantasy, and medieval painting imploring a darker palette and tone. Abandoning previous iconography, which referred directly to sci-fi, these new scenes present exotic religious ritual, prophecy, pilgrimage, and indoctrination. Figures such as a cloaked monk and a seemingly dead explorer intermingle with disembodied floating heads, open fires and glowing chalices engaged in a sacrilegious party of excess. At once his paintings present depth and flatness utilizing a fluctuating scale across the picture leaving an unstable idea of space, time or dimension. Misiisto, the title of the exhibition is taken from the failed utopian language of Esparanto—often used by Anderson in his work—that was created to encourage international peace and understanding.

Scott Anderson (b. 1973) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Anderson has exhibited solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica; Chicago Cultural Center; Miami University of Ohio, Oxford, OH. His work has also been included in exhibitions at the Cranbrook Art Museum, MI; Happy Lion, Los Angeles; fa projects, London; P.P.O.W Gallery, NY; and Luckman Gallery, California State University, LA. Anderson’s work was recently acquired by the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and was just featured in Bon Magazine. Additionally, Scott will be participating in the Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY.

Kavi Gupta



Finish artist Esko Männikkö was nominated for his retrospective Cocktails 1990 – 2007, shown at Millesgården, Stockholm, Sweden (1 September – 4 November 2007).

Esko Männikkö became widely known for The Female Pike, which featured bachelors living isolated lives in the Finnish countryside. In this series, as well as his work Mexas (1999), produced on the border between Mexico and Texas, each photograph is instilled with the peculiarities and unique characteristics of the individuals. He captures a melancholic but beautiful sense of deterioration in series such as Organized Freedom (1999 – 2005) and Flora & Fauna (2002); and in his most recent and ongoing series Harmony Sisters, taken in farms and zoos around the world, abstract photographs of animals are rendered as still-lifes. Männikkö presents his photographs in assorted reclaimed wooden frames, weathered and aged by time, which lend his images a timeless, almost painterly quality.

Esko Männikkö was born in 1959 in Pudasjärvi in the northern part of Finland. He lives and works in Oulu, Finnland.

The exhibition of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008 is currently on show at The Photographers’ Gallery until 6 April 2008.

The other three finalists were John Davies, Jacob Holdt and Fazal Sheikh. Männikkö was chosen by the Jury members, Els Barents, Director, Huis Marseille (The Netherlands), Jem Southam, photographer (UK), Thomas Weski, Chief Curator, Haus der Kunst (Germany) and Anne-Marie Beckmann, Curator, Art Collection Deutsche Börse (Germany). The Chair is Brett Rogers, Director, The Photographers’ Gallery.

Nordenhake
Photonet



MAT BRINKMAN

At certain times in history something unexpected, groundbreaking, and ahead of its time arises. From the eternal dark rivers of Providence, RI came Fort Thunder. Under its pure and unrestricted banner founders Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, together with the legions of unbridled creativity, fought against the quietness of modern mediocrity throughout the dark age of the 1990’s. Despite its demolition in 2002, the legacy of Fort Thunder continues to inspire a generation of artists who keep the true and hallowed flame of the underground in art alive.

LOYAL is proud to present this highly anticipated solo exhibition of new drawings by Mat Brinkman. Darkness will descend upon the opening night when the true defender of black metal, E from Watain, will bring holy damnation from the vinyl players. Pure hellish superiority!

Brinkman crushes predictability and creates a new order of storytelling. With his rough yet highly sophisticated lines, Brinkman’s stripped-down, ink-on-paper drawings use little and tell much. Demon-ghouls with razor claws and cloud-shaped entities bound through an unearthly labyrinthine darkness made up of cell-like squirming lines, revealing primordial undertones in our contemporary world.

In the year 2002, the four person outfit Forcefield (Fort Thunder residents Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg and Ara Peterson) was included in the Whitney Biennial. In 2006 a retrospective of Providence artists in the exhibition Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present was held at the RISD Museum. The exhibition included 1000’s of posters made for events at Fort Thunder and at places like Hilarious Attic and Dirt Palace.

Teratoid Heights, the first collection of Brinkman’s work was published in the summer of 2003 by Highwater Books. A classic of dark and heavy energy, Teratoid Heights is oblivious to the passing of time in its epic, monolithic spirit. New work by Brinkman will be featured in the forthcoming volume of LOYAL Magazine.

Galleri Loyal



Ida Kvetny Blaze

It is a pleasure to present Ida Kvetny’s second solo exhibition Blaze in the gallery. The exhibition can be seen from March 8th – April 19th 2008. Kvetny shows new paintings, drawings and sculptures.

Human, organic and geometric shapes are intertwined in Ida Kvetny’s paintings. With compositional superiority they blur the starting point of the abstract and figurative elements. Plane and object create complex spatialities that resemble more a kind of non-hierarchical mapping than a traditional perspective space.

A subtle, almost invisible detail spreads seeds, sprouts and ramifies along unpredictable traces and fragmentary connections arise. The overload of information destabilizes the sense of direction and logical reading of the image. Simultaneously with this dynamic, psychedelic, dense and intense colour explosion, the lines are also strongly controlled and the structure tightly composed. The gestured, imaginative paintings spring from diverse sources such as the surrealists’ automatic drawings, action painting, spontaneous abstract painting, pop culture, comics and simple computer graphics.

Kvetny expands the paintings in combination with her sculptures. The two- and three-dimensional works operate on the same terms with repetitive motivic ornamentation. Objects bought on the net, found on flea markets or in second hand shops are part of the works and contain an echo of former life and bring a story, a drama or a memory into the sculpture or painting. The shiny sculptures are situated on coloured tubes of plastic that work as synthetic plinths. At first glance the sculptures look like solid abstract masses but at a closer look plastic figures turn up. The sculptural automatic drawings function as a trunk, a root, a key to the painting where the figurative elements become a starting point for the viewer to freely navigate in the paintings.

There is something straightforward and surprising is at work in the blazing universe of Kvetny that possesses a peculiar drive and a crystallizing force.

Ida Kvetny (b. 1980) lives in Copenhagen after studying three years abroad. She is educated from The Funen Art Academy 2002-2004, Edinburgh College of Art 2004-2006, she has been at the Norfolk Summer School of Art at Yale University 2005 and she has received her MA from Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London in 2007. She received the Young Artist of the Year 2007 award from Ledernes Hovedorganisation. In 2007, she participated in the group exhibition Comix! at Brandts in Odense, Denmark, in Mad Love – Young Art in Danish Private Collections at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art 2007 and in a group exhibition at the Museum of Art, Seoul National University in Korea.

Kirkhoff


One of the best groups from the the early 80`
The Dark Roses

Rasmus Bjørn (DK) “Paradise Valley”
MOGADISHNI CPH is proud to present ’Paradise Valley’, an exhibition of new works by the Danish artist Rasmus Bjørn (b. 1973). In ’Paradise Valley’ Rasmus Bjørn for the first time presents himself both as painter and as storyteller. ’Paradise Valley’ is a story of a fictitious place, where the story is dominated by loose ends and empty spaces, and where the traces of what has just happened and what might happen creates an undertone of disturbance and uncertainty in our imagination. Rasmus Bjørn draws upon storytelling elements from fiction and creates tension through a subtle unease and a fragmented visual structure that makes it hard for the spectator to create continuity in the story. Smaller and apparently meaningless elements like owls, pearl necklaces and cell phones are presented together with empty landscapes, deserted parks and lonely street lights. Do hidden connections between the seemingly different objects exist? What is the relation between the bag and the burning candle? What is the role of the rubbed out lipstick? Where do the keys fit? These isolated elements build a narrative from the traces of left actions and lost memories which are embodied in the work. In this story a creeping uncanniness is created through references to the visual language of filmmakers like Hitchcock and David Lynch, where you sense that madness is lurking right beneath the surface of suburban normality and behind the facades of the otherwise neatly looking houses. Bjørn explores the levels of the painterly both through craft and storytelling, where by the narrative limits of painting are challenged, and a possibility of an expanded story and multiple storylines are presented. In this way, the spectator feels that he is co-creator of a yet unfinished story.

Aaron Johnson (US) “Where the Buffalo Roams”
MOGADISHNI CPH also proudly presents “Where the Buffalo Roam”, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by American artist Aaron Johnson (b. 1975). When first encountering Aaron Johnson’s works, the viewer is subjected to a psychedelic and brightly coloured sensuous bombardment presenting grotesque characters and tales about the absurd and repressed aspects of national identity and contemporary society. The works evoke a confounded iconography, where the symbols of popular culture present its purposelessness and superficiality. Johnson subverts the dark psychological content of his works by shadowing it under glitzy colours and seductive surfaces, thereby tapping into the dynamic of the spectacle which operates in contemporary culture. The show’s title, “Where the Buffalo Roam”, is a line pulled from the American folk song “Home on the Range” which served as an unofficial anthem of the settlers as they forged forward to tame the Wild West. Underneath the seemingly idyllic setting of the wide open plains of the American western frontier, lies the reference to a murkier reality of what gets repressed in the process of creating a national mythology. By playing with the national narrative in this way, the works in the exhibition provide a delirious examination of what lurks beneath the surface of the American dream. Characteristic for Aaron Johnson’s work is a painting method which turns the conventions of painting inside-out. He paints on stretched plastic and then applies stretched netting to the painted image, allowing the paint to congeal to the net through an application of polymer. Afterwards the plastic is peeled away and the painting is complete, now transferred to the hardened polymer and netting. This method in painting creates a very tactile surface and a possibility of collage elements to be embedded in the paintings texture. Aaron Johnson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and holds an MFA from Hunter College. His work is in the collection of the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art and in the permanent drawings collection of MoMA, New York.

Mogadishni

Kurimanzutto