Galleri Bo Bjerggaard

Ivan Andersen’s practice delves into the mutable and unstable qualities inherent within painting without compromising its integrity. Manipulating and stretching the medium of painting (sometimes literally), he works through its material potential to reveal underlying visual structures and patterns. Often uniting realism and abstraction within the same work, his subject matter varies from figuration to landscapes and deftly drafted architectural spaces. The surface tactility of his paintings is achieved through painting on MDF and plywood panel, including mixed media such as paper collage, fabric and yarn.

Emily Gernild’s paintings present a lush series of tableaux within the still life tradition that take exception to commonly held notions of the genre. Rather than the finality of ‘nature morte’, her works are filled with the promise of vitality and the potentiality of being. Lying seductively between abstraction and representation, her opulent paintings exude a deeply sensory awareness of colour and shape. Rabbit-skin glue imbues her paintings with an ethereal and shimmery quality, as the organic material permeates their surfaces.

Painted in earthy tones and saturated hues, fruits, nuts, seeds, vegetation and flower buds are seen alongside jugs of creamy milk and rich, dark soil, embodying a desire for nourishment that sustains the continuous cycle of life. As if filled to the brim, her painted cups generously ‘runneth over’ with the cloying sweetness of port wine. Perhaps preoccupied by existential thought, at times a darkness pervades the paintings, alluding to the divergent peripheries of abundance.

Tal R’s expressionistic work is immersed in a visual language that considers the figurative and its inherent mystery as a salient motif within his sensual and intuitive images. His practice broadly includes painting, drawing, collage, prints, sculpture and installation. The luminous quality of the paintings is expressed through the application of lusciously applied oil paint. Foregoing prefabricated black colour, he combines colours to create a bespoke ‘black’ within his palette, further eliciting ‘the feeling of colours colliding with other colours’. The naiveté of outsider art and the experience of the everyday has formed his approach drawn from past and present––ranging from nostalgia for the streets, bars, and sex shops of Copenhagen to the intimacy of the boudoir, where nude figures recline, and to the home, where accumulated bric-à-brac resides.

Janaina Tschäpe’s multidisciplinary work embraces aquatic, plant, and human life, exploring the transformation of sensuous forms evocative of the natural world. Spanning painting, drawing, photography, video and sculpture, her sublime visual language dwells within the nebulous space between representation and abstraction. She seeks a ‘fluid dialogue between drawing and painting, both melting into each other’, wherein her compositions and landscapes feature colourful amorphous shapes and organic structures layered, overpainted and drawn upon each other in carefully calibrated hues. Interested throughout her artistic practice in the experience of being underwater and how dimensions and perspective are lost, the sea is featured prominently in her photographs and videos, with floating creatures reminiscent of jellyfish or squid, and women’s bodies entangled with flowing fabric and balloons.

Per Kirkeby is among the most internationally acclaimed and prolific Danish artists. His work is influenced by a background in arctic geology, along with an interest in both the natural and built environment. An early member of the ‘Eks-skolen’ (The Experimental Art School), his approach remained iconoclastic throughout his career. As he has mentioned, ‘The role of art is to accept that things break down. That is the only way to get something new to emerge’. Known for the variety of media in his practice, he fearlessly combined painting, sculpture, and printmaking using a multitude of techniques to explore the tensions between abstraction and representation. Recurring motifs of architecture, structures, rocks, figures, flora and fauna appear within a wide-ranging palette of radiant to earthy colours and deep inky blacks.

Per Bak Jensen is recognised as a forerunner in the Scandinavian milieu of contemporary art photography. He focuses on the harmony and tension that arises between nature, landscape, and the built environment, as well as a personal response to his surroundings that touches on memoir. Spanning both black-and-white and colour photography, at times Bak Jensen’s straightforward images verge on abstraction, capturing not only, as he has said, ‘the being of places’, but how they are visualised through the frame of the lens. Marc-Christoph Wagner of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art writes, ‘If you asked him, he would say that the subjects speak to him because there is more there, soul or spirit. He would indicate that the metaphysics he explores in his pictures goes beyond the instantly accessible or present.

Jonathan Meese, widely recognised as a visual provocateur, takes gestural abstraction to another level through his intense engagement with materials. His paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos, and immersive installations are charged with a riotous palette of colour, unconstrained mark-making and haphazardly assembled kitsch objects—appearing at once fierce and spontaneous. Paint is squeezed thickly from the tube or splattered and dripped, crayon and ink pen are scribbled, objects are scattered. The faces and creatures that feature in his work are based on personas, both fantastical and historical, as well as on self-portraits or himself in disguise. Writing and text in his work make references to literature, films, and ideologies. Titles in German, urgently written in capital letters, address the viewer with declarative and passionate statements, often about art, artists, or the depicted imagery.