Triangle / Group Show

Per Arnoldi, Lisbeth Bank, Jens Birkemose, Astrid Marie Christiansen, Viera Collaro, Elmer, Malte Fisker, Leonard Forslund, Morten Steen Hebsgaard, Steffen Jørgensen, Malene Landgreen, Mogens Møller, Michael Mørk, Bodil Nielsen, Nikolaj Recke, René Schmidt, Andreas Schulenburg, Jonas Hvid Søndergaard, Søren Taaning.

Galleri Christoffer Egelund is proud to present “TRIANGLE”, a comprehensive group exhibition organized by Elmer, Andreas Schulenburg, Jonas Hvid Søndergaard and Jørgen Egelund. The Danish art scene – as well as the triangle – has different edges and angles, and the idea behind this exhibition has been to create a bouquet of these extremes and show them all in a single exhibition. The result of this gather is the magnificent group exhibition TRIANGLE, an explosion of shape and color in which the triangle – as motif, form and symbol – is the subject of nineteen Danish contemporary artists’ varied optics. In generation the artists represented range from upcoming young art students like Astrid Marie Christiansen and Malte Fisker, to well established artists, such as Mogens Møller, Per Arnoldi, Jens Birkemose, and Viera Collaro, who have been performing their whole life.

Most of the artists in the exhibition work with painting, and the expression of their work spans widely. In the abstract genre the paintings reach from the non-figurative painterly expressionism of Jens Birkemose (b. 1943) to the rigorous geometric formalism of Per Arnoldi (b. 1941). For Arnoldi, the dynamic triangle represents one of the heaviest clichés of an abstract painting, which is exactly his motif: the cliché accepted and colorized. Geometry and mathematics is to Steffen Jørgensen (b. 1940) an endless source of inspiration, and his works are therefore formulated around a Swedish mathematician Helge von Koch, who experimented with creating a snowflake from a mathematical infinity formula consisting of triangles. Also working in a formalist language, Malene Landgreen (b. 1962) uses the triangle as a container for pure color, from which infinite possibilities of meaning can arise. Leonard Forslund (b. 1959) does not hold on to a rigorously geometric expression, but he still strives anonymity in his paintings using abstract patterns and surfaces, which however can be easily perceived as figuration, such as landscapes. Within the non-figurative field, there are also artists working with the form as ornament. In for example Bodil Nielsen’s (b. 1957) paintings the triangle often appear as an underlying grid; as a serial infinite pattern, just as in Søren Taaning’s (b. 1964) formalist-graphic paintings where the form has the character of ornament. Unlike the above-mentioned painters’ celebration of the triangle as shape, some of the younger artists are provoked by the triangle’s insistent stability and stubborn logic. Astrid Marie Christiansen (b. 1981) for instance, revolt against the way the triangle as a marker of vanishing point, is taken for granted. She tries to disrupt the internal geometry of the world, by making hundreds of vanishing points in one painting. Malte Fisker (b. 1988) tries to break the viewer’s logic expectations, by using colors and brush strokes to create optical illusions and “paint triangles, as were they squares”.

Several of the artists in the exhibition are working in a more figurative field, in particular Andreas Schulenburg (b. 1975) that uses the triangle as a sort of eye-catching mechanics in the same manner as in advertisements. Elmer (b. 1952) is also predominantly working with the figurative. He is known for his “post-paintings”, reproductions of famous paintings. He does not believe that you can paint something original and he therefore prefers to highlight themes, that he considers appropriate to further attention. Jonas Hvid Søndergaard’s (b. 1977) paintings seem oddly figurative despite the fact that his paintings mostly consist of abstract surfaces. He is fascinated by triangulation, a surveying technique that he learned about on a fieldtrip in school. Since then, he has almost always incorporated into triangles in his art: “The same way you can make a map of triangles, it turned out you can also make a painting.”

The exhibition also features three-dimensional works such as objects, sculpture and installation. In this field the viewer will also experience a wide variation in expression and content; at one end artists concerned with the abstract formal experiments. Here is notably Rene Schmidt (b. 1968) whose sculptures’ structure mimics industrial ways of shaping objects. He often uses the triangle when making 3-d drawing and as a model form in constructing his industrial three-dimensional sculptures. Mogens Møller’s (b. 1934) rectilinear minimalism seeks to sharpen the viewer’s conception of space, like Michael Mørk (b. 1959), who experiments with the dynamics of shape and with color as creator of surface and depth.

The triangle’s associative, symbolic and emblematic character is also the focus in several of the three-dimensional works. Lisbeth Bank’s (b. 1975) wall object includes variations on the familiar “Amager Shelf”, a piece of furniture that, similar to tiled tables and allotments, is a symbol of the Danish middle class. Morten Steen Hebsgaard (b. 1977) has based his work for the exhibition on the association flow surrounding the word ‘triangle’, where ‘sex’ is the most striking. The artist has created a triangular pool table entitled “Pool”, a word whose associations collide with those of ‘triangle’. Further on, there are artists with a more conceptual approach, such as Nikolaj Recke’s (b. 1969) conceptual work, consisting of bags of sand set in a triangular formation, is not easily read without the explanation that the sand stems from the artist’s triangular cutout of the German coast line, which in addition makes the work touch upon the genre of land art. Last but not least, the exhibition displays works by Viera Collaro (b. 1946), who often makes use of basic shapes like triangles in her light installations, that are often minimalist in expression jet sensual, spiritual, meditative and universal in content.

Galleri Christoffer Egelund cordially invites you to the private view of the group exhibition TRIANGLE friday November 5th from 4pm to 8pm, where more of the artists will be present. The exhibition will subsequently be on show during the period November 6th – December 4th, 2010. Opening hours: Monday-Friday 11am to 6pm, Saturdays 12pm to 4pm. For further information about the exhibition and press photos please contact the gallery on info@egelund.dk or visit www.gce.nu