Jonas Kasper Jensen | STRING

It is with great pleasure that Arden Asbæk Gallery and Martin Asbæk Gallery, as the first gallery in Denmark, can present an exhibition focusing on one of the most current and groundbreaking tendencies within contemporary art: NFT (‘Non-fungible token’). Behind the exhibition STRING stands the Danish crypto artist Jonas Kasper Jensen, who as one of the first in Denmark started working with blockchain in 2015.

What is special about Jonas Kasper Jensen’s work is that he does not work exclusively digitally, but that his digital works are based on physical paintings, without, however, considering himself a painter. In the exhibition, the physical paintings and the associated NFTs constitute the works equally, as the physical works in principle would be without value, were it not for the information contained in the NFT. For the NFT is, in short, a digital certificate, anchored in the blockchain that is its underlying infrastructure.

NFTs have taken the art world by storm and made headlines around the world. The interest in the new technology has created great debate about everything from its artistic possibilities to economic speculation and environmental consequences. For Jonas Kasper Jensen, the fascination with blockchain technology has been both his inspiration and medium. Through his artistic work, Jensen not only gives his works infinite life in the intangible parallel world, which is the Internet, but he also deals with the blockchain technology itself, its development and challenges. In this way, Jensen’s works have both a conceptual and formal relationship to the technology that lies behind, as in the STRING series, which has been created over many months.

As a general rule, Jonas Kasper Jensen has created one painting a month, which mimics how Bitcoin mines coins. In this way, the works reflect the development of the technology in an abstract way, while at the same time giving shape to what is going on within the blockchain and crypto art scene at a given time. Such as in the series Plasma DEX Garden. These works were created at an early time, when blockchain technology was not yet mature, but enthusiasm was high. The works are in a way recognizable and recall Monet’s fleeting rendition of gardens. However, these works are not the representation of a single real garden, but the representation of 100 fictitious ones. Using artificial intelligence, 100 virtual templates have been generated for a garden, which the artist has subsequently painted on top of each other, one by one. The variations in the series are thus due to the errors in the physical process of the paintings, and as the works have subsequently been photographed and digitalized, the final work has, on several occasions, been detached from its natural starting point; the real, physical garden, flourishing and full of life. What we see is therefore no longer the representation of a garden, but instead something that exists in its own simulacral truth.

The collaboration between a crypto artist and a gallery comes from the realization that the two worlds do not have to stand in opposition to each other, but can complement and reinvent each other. In the digital marketplaces, the works of art are presented on alongside both football cards and hobby comics, but through the selection and curation, which takes place in the gallery, digital art can be put in focus, without the risk of being lost in the vastness of the internet.

Jonas Kasper Jensen (b. 1982) lives and works in Copenhagen. He graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2012 and Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main in 2011. Over the past five years, Jensen has had exhibitions in countries spanning Chile, Sweden, Germany, South Korea and the United States, of course alongside countless online shows. In addition to this, he has won awards from the Statens Kunstfond in Denmark and the Ernst & Young Prize in Frankfurt, and been to residencies in London, Lithuania and Chile.

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation