CONTINUUM OF US

Arden Asbæk Gallery is pleased to present CONTINUUM OF US, a group show featuring Valerie Collart, Mathias Kruse Jørgensen, Peter Thomas Petersen, Simone Søndergaard Poulsen and Carla Wedderkopp. The show explores themes such as fragility, mortality, and change, in a seemingly endless exchange between the five artists. The artists cross pollinate each other’s work, in the same way that the personal cannot be separated from the political or how materiality and concept rarely stand alone. Each artist offers a negative space, a room for interpretation, inviting the viewer in.

As you first enter the space, you are faced with an unmade bed. The linen seems crisp and inviting, but the imprint in the bed also suggests a recent presence. In her work “slip”, Carla Wedderkopp uses the bed as a trope of collectively understood intimacy, while also exploring sexual and identity politics. In the margins of “slip”, a coherent work, “slip in time”, is challenging the audience to experience themselves in a scene, amongst objects waiting for their story to be reenacted. Time is warped and memory conserved in sealed glasses containing bits of the bedsheet, preserved with the essence it holds.

Peter Thomas Petersen brings the exhibition into the sphere of family with his series of digitally manipulated imagery, based on inherited albums of family photos. These photo albums have a generic quality to them: they depict family and friends celebrating common milestones such as birthdays, weddings, and holidays. However, the passing of time has impacted the original photographs noticeably, mirroring the artist’s own eroded memories. By purposely emphasizing the pixels embedded in the digital copies, the fractured and elusive qualities of memory are brought forward.

Tactual sensation and art historical references are present in the work of Valerie Collart. Collart’s series of porcelain sculptures allude to drapery of classical sculpture, but keeps a surrealistic, enigmatic appearance. Seashell shaped objects are made from fabric directly soaked into liquid porcelain, placed on a geometrical clay skeleton, keeping the fabric in place. Once fired, the movement of the soaked fabric will be solidified, and the sculpture will remain fragile with cracks appearing on the surface, pointing to the strength in daring fragility, while embracing the flawed and accepting change as aspects of human life.

Three large black-and-white photographs document the before-and-after of a surgery that visual artist Mathias Kruse Jørgensen underwent in 2020. In what becomes an intimate exploration of what was and what is, the removal of a birthmark and its subsequent scaring is equally a testament to the symbiosis between presence and absence, a faint memory of a mother that passed-away and a perpetual hint of fear, deeply rooted in the artist’s self-image. Jørgensen’s subtle portraits explore the lasting effect that our life conditions can have on us as well as how our understanding hereof may change over time as we grow.

Simone Søndergaard Poulsen is not only a visual artist. With her background in architecture, Poulsen has created a three-dimensional, large-scale drawing. Abstract shapes have broken away and are floating like splinters in space, like paper scraps coming to life. While the motif is based on the current political situation in Iran, a freedom revolution started by women, Poulsen is primarily concerned with revolution as a concept, as a sudden and fundamental change of an existing system, once considered the norm.