In her exhibition “Walking Between” Melou Vanggaard has created a visual, expressive and suggestive installation of paintings in Galleri Christoffer Egelund’s large front room, where she explores the narrative potential of paintings in a metaphorical short story style.
The exhibition introduces us to, amongst other things, a series of colour-intensive glazed landscapes and human beings painted with quick strokes of the brush, whose blurred faces reduce their vague bodies to nothing but movement and action. The many different forms, sizes and formats of the paintings, all expressed in Melou Vanggaard’s characteristic expressive and energetic imagery, explore the field of possibilities embodied in the ambiguities and spaces between the abstract and the narrative, between impulse and control, text and figuration. The result is a giant collage of experiences, lyrical images and narratives whose motivic inspirations are impressions of the artist’s own surroundings or drawn from media images and Albrecht Dürer’s graphical world.
Thus the narrative structure of the exhibition moves through different thematic phases, from the loneliness of the motel room depicted in American road movies to desperate party nights in the bars, where images, language and narrative interact, telling an open-ended story. It is the atmosphere between the pictures; the feeling of silence before the storm in places where life unfolds between the decisions in the search for turning points – on the road towards something else.
In the back of the gallery, Melou Vanggaard has invited five artists to exhibit who all work in a very personal artistic universe, although with highly different expressions: In a series of blood collages, Mikkel S. Andersen (DK) deals with themes such as bitterness, sarcasm, mental catastrophes and general weltschmerz. Zven Balslev’s (DK) expressive black/white pen-and-ink drawings are highly influenced by underground cartoons and musical subcultures such as black metal, punk and noise, that often profess an extreme black humour and elude the norms of mainstream culture. In her installation and performance, Line Skywalker Karlström (SE) deals with different problems related to normality, above all coupled to hierarchies of values related to gender, sexuality and class. With his free and expressive imagery, Erling Viktor (DK/D) works very formally with paintings in a searching investigation of the expression, kinetics, contrast and composition of colour. Kerstin Wagener (D) works with a multifarious aesthetic impression, with inspiration from pop, trash and glamour.