We are very delighted to announce that Maria Wæhrens has received the Three Year Working Grant from The Danish Arts Foundation.
Sincere congratulations to Wæhrens!
For more info, please see Statens Kunstfond
Installation view. Maria Wæhrens. From the group show Maglemølle.com, Næstved, Denmark, 2020.
We are pleased to announce that a new book entitled No Safe Place by Peter Brandt will be published by Really Simple Syndication Press in October, 2020.
The book No Safe Place is edited by Hugo Hopping, and contains an essay, “The Forensics of Trauma ”, by Jeppe Ugelvig. In addition, the book offers texts by Peter Brandt. The book is graphically designed by Assembly and supported by Offerfonden.
Huge congratulations to Peter Brandt with this new publication!
In addition, Peter Brandt has recently launched a new website that provides a comprehensive insight into Brandt's impressive oeuvre. For Brandt's new website please see: peter-brandt.com
Peter Brandt. Installation view. Västerås Art Museum, Västerås, Sweden, 2016.
We are happy to inform you that Marianne Therese Grønnow and Dorte Jelstrup show new works at the exhibition Quarantine Works #1, August 26 - August 30, 2020, Julius Valentiners Vej 22, st., 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark.
Quarantine Works #1 is presented as a part of Opal Spaces: Artists / Location, which is a new experimental program that couples artists with an unconventional location.
IMPORTANT: To ensure that the exhibition is held within the framework of the restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19, we kindly request anyone wishing to view the exhibition Quarantine Works #1 to book a time slot no later than 48 hours in advance by sending an email to: booktimeslot@opalspaces.com
Visual artists have historically thematized pandemics. A striking example of this is the European artists' pictorial representations of and reflections on the Plague from the mid-14th century and onwards. Visual art's approaches to pandemics have been diverse over the years. The plague has been seen as a warning of punishment for committed sin, in their works visual artists have emphasized empathy with the suffering victims of pandemics, and especially modern artists have created self-portraits in an attempt to counter the destructive ravages of the pandemic by giving a response that highlights an individual agency despite the encounter with vulnerability, fragility, illness and the far too close presence of death.
The exhibition Quarantine Works #1 has the experience of today's Covid-19 pandemic as a thematic focal point and shows brand new works by two of Denmark's most prominent women artists, namely Marianne Therese Grønnow and Dorte Jelstrup. All the works in the exhibition Quarantine Works #1 have been created during the Covid-19 situation. These are works that are semantically open for the audience to mirror their own experiences and emotions as well as thoughts related to what it means to live and be a human being during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The exhibition Quarantine Works #1 is held at a special location, namely in a former room for psychological consultation in Frederiksberg, Denmark; the room is more or less emptied so that the artworks constitute the main artifacts of the site. The artistic intention of this choice of location is to facilitate an encounter between the audience and the artworks that emphasize the states of consciousness associated with the experience of going through a pandemic. The works by Grønnow and Jelstrup breathe new and different life into this unconventional location, and at the same time the site sets a framework for the artworks that points in the direction of the artistic experience as psychologically integrative and healing.
As such, Quarantine Works #1 is intended to be broad in it's scope understood in the sense that most of us in this time in one way or another have had and still have experiences, emotions and thoughts related to the Covid-19 pandemic just as our living circumstances have been affected in various ways by the Covid-19 situation.
The exhibition Quarantine Works #1 gives the audience in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the summer of 2020 an opportunity to see newly created works that speak directly into a field of experience that is the audience's own. And at the same time, the exhibition connects to the historical pictorial explorations of earlier times of what it means to live and be a human being during a pandemic.
Marianne Therese Grønnow shows new drawings and paintings at Quarantine Works #1. The drawings, created with pencil on paper, present themselves to the viewer as intimate probings of everyday objects that connect to life in a lockdown situation. The drawings show a bottle of homemade hand desinfectant, a book (Ulysses by James Joyces), empty wine bottles, a sugar bowl and detergent - objects that are given in the immediate life within the four walls of the home. Grønnow also shows a larger painting whose surface is painted with gold and rainbow-like colors that represent the visible spectrum.
The ground of the painting is created from older works that have been cut up, and points in this way back to a lockdown situation, where the artist is referred to creating out of the material that is already at hand in the studio. The painting's gold surface casts a light back on the viewer, just as the rainbow-like colors' reference to the light spectrum puts light as the painting's basic thematic focal point in a negating contrast to the darkness that the pandemic and its experience bring with it. But also in an emphasis that art can respond to the pandemic situation by a materialization of new light-filled hopes, just as the art experience can be the healing force that indicates a way out of the pandemic darkness.
Dorte Jelstrup shows new pen and ink drawings with gouache on paper at Quarantine Works #1. The works, entitled From the Twilight Zone (Self-portrait/During the Covid-19 Pandemic) and From the Twilight Zone (Male Nude with Roses/During the Covid-19 Pandemic), are self-portraits and depictions of the masculine Other. The drawings narrate psychologically and in a pictorial form the experience of existing in an imaginary transition zone between life and death and day and night - a zone with a basic impulse reflecting the pandemic reality that death is near and a latent, present possibility.
This zone, the Twilight Zone, from which Jelstrup's drawings are derived, can also be interpretatively seen as a subjective consciousness, expressed as an inner container for soul-disturbing and anxious mental states related to the death that the pandemic brings with it. The works appear both optically alluring by their purple, violet, magenta and orange-red colors that glow on the white paper, but at the same time also unreal, other-worldly and eerie.
Quarantine Works #1 is produced as a collaboration between Opal Spaces, Marianne Therese Grønnow and Dorte Jelstrup and is presented as a part of Opal Spaces: Artists / Location, which is a new experimental program that couples artists with an unconventional location. Opal Spaces: Artists / Location aims to allow the participating artists to create location-responsive exhibitions in a weighting of the participating artists' freedom and autonomy to install and present their works in accordance with their own creative imagination and ideas.
For more info, please see Opal Spaces, Quarantine Works #1
For photographs and inquiries, please contact: quarantineworks@opalspaces.com
Quarantine Works #1 is shown at the same time as CHART Art Fair, which in 2020 only shows works created by women artists. Everyone is strongly recommended to attend CHART Art Fair, 2020.
Exhibition period: August 26 - August 30, 2020. Opening hours: Wednesday - Sunday: 2-5 pm. Location: Julius Valentiners Vej 22, st., 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Produced as a collaboration between Opal Spaces, Marianne Therese Grønnow and Dorte Jelstrup as a part of the program Opal Spaces: Artists / Location.
The exhibition is held within the framework of the restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19 (the Danish Ministry of Culture's guidelines for cultural institutions where the public moves around).
IMPORTANT: To ensure that the exhibition is held within the framework of the restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19, anyone wishing to view the exhibition must book a time slot no later than 48 hours in advance by sending an email to: booktimeslot@opalspaces.com
Facing the current pandemic crisis it is of great importance to stay connected and exchange views, perspectives and ideas. We strongly believe in the power of art as a means for human connection, a tool for communication, expression and criticality, and a catalyst for transformation and social change. As a result of the pandemic crisis we therefore extend our online Viewing Room program; in the coming months we will present a series of new online exhibitions in Opal Spaces Viewing Room.
We are very happy to present the first online exhibition in this new series:
Dorte Jelstrup Back Catalogue
MAY 1 - MAY 29, 2020
Opal Spaces Viewing Room
To see the show go to opalspaces.com/dorte-jelstrup-back-catalogue
The exhibition Dorte Jelstrup Back Catalogue presents a retrospective overview of Dorte Jelstrup's works. The constructive principle of this retrospective overview, however, differs from the classic linear chronologically constructed retrospective exhibition.
In keeping with the way Jelstrup sees her own oeuvre, the exhibition Dorte Jelstrup Back Catalogue is built on a cyclical principle, whereby the viewer is invited to go back and forth between key work categories in Jelstrup's artistic production, be it the satin ribbon painting, the pen and ink drawing, the installation, the montage and the performative photography, which in precisely cyclic movements reemerge again and again in Jelstrup's work - gathered around a basic thematic axis, where the feminine self and its relation to the male Other are constantly recurring semantic key points.
For inquiries please contact: contact@opalspaces.com
For more info on Opal Spaces Viewing Room please see: opalspaces.com/opal-spaces-viewing-room
We are very delighted to announce that Peter Brandt has just recieved the Three Year Working Grant from The Danish Arts Foundation. Huge congratulations to Brandt!
For more info, please see www.kunst.dk/for-ansoegere/tildelinger
Peter Brandt. Monument to Sexual Violence, 2018. Bleached silk, watercolor and pencil. 330 x 135 cm.
We are happy to announce that Marianne Therese Grønnow, Dorte Jelstrup and Maria Wæhrens participated in the show Writings of Bodies <<<We Know It From the Inside>>>, November 30, 2019 - February 5, 2020, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark.
The show was curated by Elisabeth Toubro, Kathrine Ærtebjerg and Dorte Jelstrup and featured prominent contemporary female artists spanning generations – each of whom draws on bodily experiences in the conceptualisation and creation of their works.
Participating artists:
Lise Blomberg, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Jeannette Ehlers, Marianne Therese Grønnow, Lea Guldditte Hestelund, Dorte Jelstrup, Kirsten Justesen, Sophia Kalkau, Stense Andrea Lind-Valdan, Maja Malou Lyse, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Elisabeth Toubro, Maria Wæhrens and Kathrine Ærtebjerg.
The show combined completely new works and a selected few previously exhibited works of importance.
Opal Spaces Viewing Room
We are proud to present our new online exhibition Concerning the Grid, August 31 - September 1, 2019.
During these mentioned days, Copenhagen, Denmark, turns into the leading and most vibrant center for contemporary art in Scandinavia; two prominent art fairs are held in Copenhagen, Denmark, during these days, namely CHART Art Fair and Enter Art Fair. We strongly recommend anyone to visit these two art fairs.
At the same time, Opal Spaces will offer collectors a selection of works created by some of Denmark's best artists working within the field of contemporary art. And with this purpose in mind Opal Spaces has curated Concerning the Grid.
Works from Concerning the Grid are available to collectors around the world exclusively online; for full details and informational texts regarding the biography of the presented artists, please see "Viewing Room" and "Artists" on our website: opalspaces.com
For inquiries please contact: contact@opalspaces.com
Concerning the Grid investigates new interpretations of a classic type within the twentieth century's visual arts, the modernist grid structure.
Participating artists:
Marianne Therese Grønnow
Dorte Jelstrup
Maria Wæhrens
Peter Brandt
Bodil Nielsen
Marianne Therese Grønnow creates large paintings that connect to the sublime and the metaphysical on the basis of impressions of nature rendered as other-worldly imaginative constructions of grid structures.
Dorte Jelstrup provides an explicit feminine interpretation of the modernist grid in paintings and montages, where the grid structures are made of satin ribbons and as such converted into a materiality of sensation that semantically connotes femininity and mental states of longing and desire.
In paintings and drawings by Maria Wæhrens, we encounter the grid as a marker of enclosed spaces in a basically queer-marked investigation of gender, power, hierarchy and the patterns that arise and are passed on in the family and in society at large.
In textile works by Peter Brandt the grid structures are reconsidered and interpreted as principles of construction in the unfolding of transformative narratives dealing with gender, violence and (bodily) traumatic experiences.
In her work, Bodil Nielsen has the colour as a central point of departure; Nielsen creates paintings that, with the grid structure as the underlying organizational principle, aim to explore perception, the relationship between the viewer and the work, and the aesthetic experience; the result is a poetic choreography of colour based on the grid.
For more information about the participating artists, please see Opal Spaces, opalspaces.com
For inquiries please contact: contact@opalspaces.com
We are pleased to announce that Dorte Jelstrup recently recieved a grant from The Danish Arts Foundation for her future artistic practice; huge congratulations to Jelstrup! For more info, please see The Danish Arts Foundation.
Dorte Jelstrup. Sometime After (Connected and Apart), 2010. Mixed media. Variable dimensions. Installation view. Exhibition at Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, 2010.
Dorte Jelstrup. With You I Wanna Go Where Peaceful Waters Flow, I, 2006. Gouache, pen and ink drawings, watercolour, chiffon, silk ribbons, wool ribbons, silk tassels, lace figure and acrylic on canvas. 156 x 234 cm. Collection The National Gallery of Denmark/Statens Museum for Kunst.
Dorte Jelstrup. And then it all vanished and the voidness came, 2012.
Mixed media. Variable dimensions. Installation view. Exhibition at Galleri Lars Olsen, Copenhagen, 2012.