Humorously minimalistic on the one hand and high-strung apocalyptic on the other: Jonas Hvid Søndergaard’s paintings borrow from the treasury chamber of abstraction to throw open the gate to compelling new visions. Hvid’s paintings are like a look into our childhood’s kaleidoscope. Yet what are twisted around in Hvid’s kaleidoscope are not coloured pieces of glass. It is the surrounding world that is turned into a new recognizability.
Jonas Hvid Søndergaard is known for his precise confrontations between the vocabulary of abstraction and the shapes of our everyday surroundings. Ladders, balconies and walls have meticulously been transformed into abstract structures on Hvid’s canvases. In addition, Hvid is known for his orchestration of abstract shapes to form apocalyptic scenarios in which whirlwinds pull us into the chaotic universe of seeming nightmares.
In this – his second solo show at bendixen contemporary art – Hvid expands the range of his painterly expression. The precise abstract interpretations of our surroundings take on a larger degree of complexity with motifs such as an orange scaffolding. The paintings featuring more chaotic scenarios are to the contrary enhanced by free flowing lava streams of changing colours and expressive markings, only just held in check by singular stabile structures. In several of his new works, abstraction completely consumes the canvas leaving no trace of a recognizable world, as if we are looking into the childhood kaleidoscope with its glass pieces still twirling around, having yet to locate their position.
In addition to new paintings, the exhibition features a number of works on paper that demonstrates the same expansion of Jonas Hvid Søndergaard’s painterly expression towards a freer formal flow.
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Jonas Hvid Søndergaard (b. 1977) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy in 2005. In August 2008 he co-curated the exhibition ”Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks”: an international painting exhibition focusing on the formal aspects of contemporary painting. In May 2009 Randers Kunstmuseum presents his solo show ”Transit”.
Jonas Hvid Søndergaard was recently awarded Niels Wessel Bagges Award.