Yet seemed it Winter Still

The spring exhibition at Faurschou CPH borrows its melancholic title from a line in Shakespeare’s beautiful spring sonnet #98. Springtime has come to give rebirth and everything blossoms, yet for the person in the sonnet, it is winter still, and the separation from the beloved is painfully felt.

The sudden awakening from winter’s darkness, the celebration of youth and life makes springtime a period of strong emotions. The contrast between death and life, the difference between being alone or together is strongly felt. “April is the cruellest Month” as T.S. Eliot says.

The exhibition displays recent works by artists represented by the gallery. Life and death; beauty and decay, joy and melancholy; existential questioning and black humour are reappearing themes in their art works, often presented in frapping aesthetics.

The exhibition is an opportunity to mention the artist’s other current activities.

Michael Bevilacqua
With his two current solo shows in New York (Gering-Lopez), and Milan (The Flat) Michael Bevilacqua is showing a new stylistic phase.
His recent works are as always multilayered, consisting of a combination of different painting techniques including free-hand brushstrokes, collage, masking and stencilling – however more wild, energetic, and rebellious than ever. Sarcasm, heavy metal, punk, and 1980’s bands fill his paintings together with skulls, body parts and poisoned apples. These darker elements are subdued by more subtle images.
The most remarkable about Michael Bevilacqua’s paintings is that they encompass a visual power that knocks over the viewer. His paintings almost shout at you. His “contemporary still lives” have catching imagery. They are diaries of everyday encounters with the world as well as abstraction and clear colours. The tactile surfaces of the canvases are aesthetically appealing; and most of all Michael Bevilacqua has an extremely intelligent talent for composing colour – all making him a unique and very vital contemporary painter.

Erik A. Frandsen
Upon his recent successful show at ARoS, Aarhus, with more than 60.000 visitors, Erik A. Frandsen will now be showing at Faurschou Beijing from March 21. – May 17. The exhibition title is “Frozen Moment Desert”.
The works for this show will be new steel works and selected large paintings.

Erik A. Frandsen will have a solo show at Galerie Hof & Huyser in Amsterdam in May.

Also Erik A. Frandsen has been invited to exhibit at the Guan Shanye Art Museum, Shenzhen as well as MoCA Shanghai in the fall/winter of 2009 and 2010.

Erik A. Frandsen’s works are in his own words “frozen moments” something seen and experienced being expressed in a medium that will hold on to the memory of these seen things and moments. With their humorous, unconventional, and astonishing contents, Frandsen’s works are thought provoking and his choice of aesthetically beautiful materials such as mosaics in Venetian smalti, large scale paintings, or shiny engraved steel plates makes these existential moments an aesthetically pleasurable experience.

Christian Lemmerz
Christian Lemmerz is busy preparing his solo show “Largo” for Statens Museum for Kunst /The Danish National Gallery.
This will be an exhibition of all new works.

The installation draws on theatrical and ritual performances, connections are drawn between the exhibition space and the ritual space of the church. A major theme in the exhibition is death, not only understood as the physical termination or the end of life, but also philosophically and existentially as absence, emptiness, and silence on the one hand side – and as the origin of culture on the other.
The exhibition will open May 16th 2009 – and run through March 6th 2010.

Coinciding with “Largo” at Statens Museum for Kunst – Faurschou CPH will host a show with new works.

Christian Lemmerz has just been awarded with the Thorvaldsen Medallion, after the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, given to him for his excellent work of art. The medallion is the highest distinction that can be given to an artist by the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

Michael Kvium
Michael Kvium is currently working on both gallery and museum exhibitions in The Netherlands and China.

Although to a greater extent Kvium chooses to paint landscapes over figuration nowadays, his paintings are as grotesque, thought provoking and painfully beautiful as ever. They are what he calls “tales for the eye” – and death always seems to be lurking in Michael Kvium’s works.
We meet just a wintry bog, a Scandinavian Waste Land abandoned for the omnipresent, lurking crows, and the thin naked oak and birch trees, and the continual “dead ends” – leading nowhere.
It is beautiful in an alarming manner. To the viewer these trees almost seem like little human figures, lonely as they stand in the landscape.
The most significant characteristic of Kvium’s landscapes is absence, even though we do from time to time meet a lonely naked human figure. And with the traces of human existence, the viewer suddenly becomes conscious of his own presence – and conscious of the painters presence as well.

Erik Parker
Erik Parker is currently showing new paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery. The show is entitled “Crisis Creation” and runs from February 26th- March 28th.
Parker is well known for his vividly colourful anthropomorphic figure, composed of various shapes. While maintaining his individual sense of space and dynamism, Parker is deeply influenced by a variety of subcultures ranging from underground comics, illustration, graffiti and music. The fluid, intense visuals of Parker’s works are informed in part by the patchwork of musical sources he listens to, none more evident than psychedelic rock. Consequently, the obvious shapes and colours, with cartoon-like doodles combine to create a vocabulary of “ordered disorder” – here, Parker’s talent continues to blossom in this new collection of work.

Nina Sten-Knudsen
Nina Sten-Knudsen has moved to Berlin working in a spacious studio, necessary for her large formats.

Nina Sten-Knudsen is preparing her upcoming museum show at Nivaagaard Art Museum, Denmark, in the fall of 2010. To be included in this exhibition is four large new works 200 x 400 cm and several smaller works.

Nina Sten-Knudsen is experimenting with perspectives in her recent landscape paintings; changing format from the smallest possible – to the full wall monumental landscapes, where the viewer feels he can actually walk into the scenery.

“Yet seemed it Winter Still” will present new works in a moderate size that show the essence of her painterly skills: the layers upon layers of imagery, from land- to city-scapes, from ancient times to our contemporary, blending dream, reality, art history and film.

FAURSCHOU