Out in the Wildwood
12 May - 26 Aug 2011
OUT IN THE WILDWOOD
12 May - 26 August, 2011
When Georg Baselitz was 17, he painted pictures of the natural surroundings near the house where he was born. That was in 1955, and he called one of the small oil paintings "Sandteichdamm". That's how most young artists begin; they start by measuring some specific distances between their eyes and the world. Then they sharpen their pencils, dip their brushes or click on their cameras, and the proof is produced: I am now a part of that. This is a part of me. The subject or action settles within the artist, and can be retrieved from memory on later occasions. In the case of Baselitz, this occurred about fifty years later, when he began to paint various things, both natural scenes and people, that were retrieved from the past. Personally-experienced events from his schooldays and youth. Things that can be revisited and brought back to life by working with the stuff of memory - and with artistic materials, of course. The seventeen-year-old is still there, just like the landscape. There may be minor or major transformations, but there is also now another distance to the world than was originally the case. It is completely tangible. Both the landscape and our childhoods are things we carry within us. Baselitz calls it forth once in a while. It has been said of his pictures over the last decade that they often seem as though they have been painted in negative format. The artist has thus always tried to paint himself deeper into the reality or behind the canvas, even though the surface in fact signals that this is where the fun stops. There is no hocus pocus about his pictures: here is a man walking along ... into the woods ... out of the woods ... into the world ... out into the world ... or home?
Baselitz shares an inheritance with Munch. Other artists interest the painter as he grows older. Motifs beget motifs. Canvases become children - at least if we are to believe Munch, who called his pictures his children. Whether Baselitz becomes a child again is an open question, but the forest is bigger when the man becomes smaller. Or else the details become larger. Sandteichdamm, painted in 2006, shows a pair of colossal feet on their way out into the mire. The feet of a giant, who, to judge by the shoe size, is at least the height of the trees depicted. The recollection is displaced. Or perhaps it is Munch's feet in Baselitz' backyard? Home country painting at its most meaningful, when it is easiest to experience its essence. A dream of a picture!
Perhaps it is about growing old. Many things in life are about growing old enough, so why not pictures? The pictures are about growing old. The entrance to the forest, as we see it in J. F. Willumsen's painting, is a gateway to what? An avenue that reminds us once again of Munch - the murderer in the avenue - all the thoughts we carry around with us in our loneliness, even when we are in the company of another person. Small dark figures at the entrance to the forest cathedral. The forest is the keynote of the soul. There is a constant deep tone there that speaks to us. Willumsen painted his picture in 1932, when he, like Baselitz, was getting on in years. From the same year we also have a self-portrait of the artist wearing a red bow tie, with sharp contours that cause his face to look as though it were chiselled out of granite. Nature has its aging processes. They can be ruthless, but also beautiful, as in a religious 17th-century painting by El Greco. J. F. Willumsen resembles his heroes - but he is also his own man. His forest is no one else's. It invites no-one. Even though a couple of people are on their way into it. Willumsen has practised this measuring out of distance. He has painted mountains, and heroic women. He has conquered nature, but he also seems to have a problem with it. The outer and the inner spaces are constantly in conflict.
Let us be honest and say that pictures are derived from other pictures. And that a sculpture can certainly look natural, as though it has grown out of its original material - and yet it is a kind of image. Per Kirkeby's bronzes have that kind of eternal tree stump character, no matter how the artist shapes his material. For Kirkeby, it is a question of giving the eye something upon which to fasten. There is a special kind of aura and serenity about these works. They are as unchanging and in a way as boring as the trees outside the window, which you take for granted until you begin to study them. The sculpture is firmly anchored in time - just as a tree or a tree stump, no matter how useless it may appear to be, has a dimension of time and force. The movements of the sun, the changing of the seasons, energy turning into matter - the invisible roots and skyward-reaching, living sap which provide a whole lifetime of cyclical theatrical drama for those who are attentive. With Kirkeby's Inventory XIII from 2002, we are back in personal history again, as with Willumsen and Baselitz. Kirkeby has created a series of works, all of which encompass elements of past works and their time. A leg grows out of the mould. And the mould - what size is it? Large or small? Tree stump or log, worked or unworked? The body or, more precisely, parts of the body are coupled with the intrinsic primordial nature of bronze, "from the darkness of the cave to the dampness of the cunt", as one wise man has put it.
The forest is damp and wet. The forest is erotic. But it can also be gross. With his large-format camera, Per Bak Jensen reads the forests of Rügen, where the Romantic Casper David Friedrich left his pictorial traces. The tree trunks stand in the cool light and remind us of the state between sleep and wakefulness. There is a tension in the picture, the source of which is invisible. We are in the all-nature, God's creative work, but we could just easily be near the camp site if the artist had not excluded this possibility. Per Bak Jensen sees motifs everywhere. He has an eye for how to frame the world so that it makes a meaningful statement. Is this a study of biology or art? Or are these merely different aspects of the same thing, just as Kirkeby's work also contains geological references? Here, we find ourselves in the slough of despond or completely lost in the wildwood. And perhaps the answer is just another question: Do we even recognise the world in which we live? Where are these places, these pictures? In ourselves, or out in the world?
There is something cinematic about the narratives of both Anne-Karin Furunes and Per Bak Jensen - as though we were floating away in a tinted world. Whereas Anne-Karin Furunes creates an evocative atmosphere with her black perforated surfaces and the idea of black trees meeting an infinite darkness, Per Bak Jensen's illusion of nature's own coolness appears crisp and comprehensible. There is a borderline here. With Furunes, we are suddenly in doubt. Perhaps the border lies in the eye. The dark depths of the pupil? Anne-Karin Furunes is Norwegian, like Munch, and her works revolve around the near-unfathomable surroundings, like a face you can remember without being able to reveal its features. In many ways, there are layers in the images which we can discern only vaguely. Everything is visible, and yet as secretive as a lived life.
The Israeli artist Yehudit Sasportas also reveals an interest in the psychic landscape in her work, Big Swamp. The big picture of nature is created from a Mikado of barbels, scattered across the large expanse of white paper. The Indian ink drawing is like a voice from the depths. Black and architecturally stringent, the lines climb vertically upwards, only to end in a jumble, a chaos, a bundle of nervous energy. Nature is present as though being studied under a microscope. The picture is an image of beauty: an image of violence and energies held together by a controlled manoeuvre. It is a feminine landscape, created by a woman who views nature as a living ornament. She maps connections that create new spaces. Sasportas has the ability to make a reality appear dual. Is this a landscape of pain? And am I a part of it, and it a part of me?
Erik Steffensen
translated by Wordmaster
12 May - 26 August, 2011
When Georg Baselitz was 17, he painted pictures of the natural surroundings near the house where he was born. That was in 1955, and he called one of the small oil paintings "Sandteichdamm". That's how most young artists begin; they start by measuring some specific distances between their eyes and the world. Then they sharpen their pencils, dip their brushes or click on their cameras, and the proof is produced: I am now a part of that. This is a part of me. The subject or action settles within the artist, and can be retrieved from memory on later occasions. In the case of Baselitz, this occurred about fifty years later, when he began to paint various things, both natural scenes and people, that were retrieved from the past. Personally-experienced events from his schooldays and youth. Things that can be revisited and brought back to life by working with the stuff of memory - and with artistic materials, of course. The seventeen-year-old is still there, just like the landscape. There may be minor or major transformations, but there is also now another distance to the world than was originally the case. It is completely tangible. Both the landscape and our childhoods are things we carry within us. Baselitz calls it forth once in a while. It has been said of his pictures over the last decade that they often seem as though they have been painted in negative format. The artist has thus always tried to paint himself deeper into the reality or behind the canvas, even though the surface in fact signals that this is where the fun stops. There is no hocus pocus about his pictures: here is a man walking along ... into the woods ... out of the woods ... into the world ... out into the world ... or home?
Baselitz shares an inheritance with Munch. Other artists interest the painter as he grows older. Motifs beget motifs. Canvases become children - at least if we are to believe Munch, who called his pictures his children. Whether Baselitz becomes a child again is an open question, but the forest is bigger when the man becomes smaller. Or else the details become larger. Sandteichdamm, painted in 2006, shows a pair of colossal feet on their way out into the mire. The feet of a giant, who, to judge by the shoe size, is at least the height of the trees depicted. The recollection is displaced. Or perhaps it is Munch's feet in Baselitz' backyard? Home country painting at its most meaningful, when it is easiest to experience its essence. A dream of a picture!
Perhaps it is about growing old. Many things in life are about growing old enough, so why not pictures? The pictures are about growing old. The entrance to the forest, as we see it in J. F. Willumsen's painting, is a gateway to what? An avenue that reminds us once again of Munch - the murderer in the avenue - all the thoughts we carry around with us in our loneliness, even when we are in the company of another person. Small dark figures at the entrance to the forest cathedral. The forest is the keynote of the soul. There is a constant deep tone there that speaks to us. Willumsen painted his picture in 1932, when he, like Baselitz, was getting on in years. From the same year we also have a self-portrait of the artist wearing a red bow tie, with sharp contours that cause his face to look as though it were chiselled out of granite. Nature has its aging processes. They can be ruthless, but also beautiful, as in a religious 17th-century painting by El Greco. J. F. Willumsen resembles his heroes - but he is also his own man. His forest is no one else's. It invites no-one. Even though a couple of people are on their way into it. Willumsen has practised this measuring out of distance. He has painted mountains, and heroic women. He has conquered nature, but he also seems to have a problem with it. The outer and the inner spaces are constantly in conflict.
Let us be honest and say that pictures are derived from other pictures. And that a sculpture can certainly look natural, as though it has grown out of its original material - and yet it is a kind of image. Per Kirkeby's bronzes have that kind of eternal tree stump character, no matter how the artist shapes his material. For Kirkeby, it is a question of giving the eye something upon which to fasten. There is a special kind of aura and serenity about these works. They are as unchanging and in a way as boring as the trees outside the window, which you take for granted until you begin to study them. The sculpture is firmly anchored in time - just as a tree or a tree stump, no matter how useless it may appear to be, has a dimension of time and force. The movements of the sun, the changing of the seasons, energy turning into matter - the invisible roots and skyward-reaching, living sap which provide a whole lifetime of cyclical theatrical drama for those who are attentive. With Kirkeby's Inventory XIII from 2002, we are back in personal history again, as with Willumsen and Baselitz. Kirkeby has created a series of works, all of which encompass elements of past works and their time. A leg grows out of the mould. And the mould - what size is it? Large or small? Tree stump or log, worked or unworked? The body or, more precisely, parts of the body are coupled with the intrinsic primordial nature of bronze, "from the darkness of the cave to the dampness of the cunt", as one wise man has put it.
The forest is damp and wet. The forest is erotic. But it can also be gross. With his large-format camera, Per Bak Jensen reads the forests of Rügen, where the Romantic Casper David Friedrich left his pictorial traces. The tree trunks stand in the cool light and remind us of the state between sleep and wakefulness. There is a tension in the picture, the source of which is invisible. We are in the all-nature, God's creative work, but we could just easily be near the camp site if the artist had not excluded this possibility. Per Bak Jensen sees motifs everywhere. He has an eye for how to frame the world so that it makes a meaningful statement. Is this a study of biology or art? Or are these merely different aspects of the same thing, just as Kirkeby's work also contains geological references? Here, we find ourselves in the slough of despond or completely lost in the wildwood. And perhaps the answer is just another question: Do we even recognise the world in which we live? Where are these places, these pictures? In ourselves, or out in the world?
There is something cinematic about the narratives of both Anne-Karin Furunes and Per Bak Jensen - as though we were floating away in a tinted world. Whereas Anne-Karin Furunes creates an evocative atmosphere with her black perforated surfaces and the idea of black trees meeting an infinite darkness, Per Bak Jensen's illusion of nature's own coolness appears crisp and comprehensible. There is a borderline here. With Furunes, we are suddenly in doubt. Perhaps the border lies in the eye. The dark depths of the pupil? Anne-Karin Furunes is Norwegian, like Munch, and her works revolve around the near-unfathomable surroundings, like a face you can remember without being able to reveal its features. In many ways, there are layers in the images which we can discern only vaguely. Everything is visible, and yet as secretive as a lived life.
The Israeli artist Yehudit Sasportas also reveals an interest in the psychic landscape in her work, Big Swamp. The big picture of nature is created from a Mikado of barbels, scattered across the large expanse of white paper. The Indian ink drawing is like a voice from the depths. Black and architecturally stringent, the lines climb vertically upwards, only to end in a jumble, a chaos, a bundle of nervous energy. Nature is present as though being studied under a microscope. The picture is an image of beauty: an image of violence and energies held together by a controlled manoeuvre. It is a feminine landscape, created by a woman who views nature as a living ornament. She maps connections that create new spaces. Sasportas has the ability to make a reality appear dual. Is this a landscape of pain? And am I a part of it, and it a part of me?
Erik Steffensen
translated by Wordmaster