Quarantine Works #2

New works by Julie Sass, Marianne Therese Grønnow and Dorte Jelstrup. September 16 - September 19, 2020. Wednesday - Saturday: 2-5 pm. Værkstedvej 24, 2500 Valby, Denmark.

Quarantine Works #2

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 #2 has the experience of today's Covid-19 pandemic as a thematic focal point and shows brand new works by Julie Sass, Marianne Therese Grønnow and Dorte Jelstrup. All the works in the exhibition Quarantine Works #2 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.

Marianne Therese Grønnow, 2020. Installation view. Quarantine Works #2. Værkstedvej 24, 2500 Valby, Denmark. Photograph: Anders Sune Berg.

Held at a special location: an artist's studio

The exhibition Quarantine Works #2 is held at a special location, namely in an artist's studio at Værkstedvej 24, 2500 Valby, Denmark. The studio has been partially emptied so that the exhibited artworks by Sass, Grønnow and Jelstrup constitute the primary objects on the site.

The artistic intention of this choice of location is to facilitate an encounter between the audience and the exhibited artworks, which also emphasizes the intimacy and nearness of the process of artistic creation - an intimacy and nearness that stand as significant for many visual artists during the Covid-19 pandemic. For a lot of artists, creating visual art during the pandemic has become an unfolding of a practice that is important and valuable in itself. The artists have in many ways been thrown back into the process of creation as the primary activity in a Covid-19 situation, where planned exhibitions and projects have been canceled, art institutions are under pressure, and new Do-It-Yourself-strategies and dynamic approaches for establishing dialogues with the audience offer themselves as viable answers to the Covid-19 situation within the field of contemporary art.

The works by Sass, Grønnow and Jelstrup give the location of the studio, which is usually inaccessible to the audience, a public, experiential dimension, and at the same time the place indicates a framework for the exhibited artworks that points towards the close relation between creating and experiencing visual art. The audience is invited to get much closer to the artistic process of creation than usual in a hopefully less distant art experience than the one usually offered in more traditional, art institutional settings.

The exhibition Quarantine Works #2 invites the audience 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.

Julie Sass shows new works on paper and paintings

Julie Sass shows new works on paper and paintings on Quarantine Works #2. The works on paper present themselves to the viewer as intimate investigations of a gestural and at the same time intuitive and constructive abstraction. On some of these works on paper, Sass has also glued cut-out painted fragments in a display of a collage technique that connotes the nearness that the lockdown situation has brought to many. The paintings also unfold as formulations of a gesturally influenced and constructive abstraction with an emphasis on simple forms and fluid brushstrokes as primary pictorial components.

Sass' works on paper and paintings point to a kind of fundamentalia of abstraction as the answer that can be given to a pandemic that refers the creative artist to the very process of creation and art in itself as something that - regardless of the pandemic - have an intrinsic value.

Marianne Therese Grønnow shows new drawings and paintings

Marianne Therese Grønnow shows new drawings and paintings at Quarantine Works #2. 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 and depict objects that are given in the immediate life within the four walls of the home.

Grønnow also shows a.o. a large painting with a surface painted with gold. 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 and puts thereby light as the painting's basic thematic focal point in a negation of the darkness that the pandemic 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 satin ribbon paintings and drawings

Dorte Jelstrup shows new satin ribbon paintings and drawings on Quarantine Works #2. The satin ribbon paintings, which bear the overall title I Walk Through the Night (It Could Have Been Ecstatic; It Never Happened/During the Covid-19 Pandemic), indicate a fundamental feminine subjectivity and can be interpreted as narratives about the ecstatic moments that could have been, but never materialized and came into being; the isolation that the lockdown situation brings with it, on the other hand, remains as that which actually occurred.

Jelstrup's pen and ink drawings with gouache also have the experience of the pandemic as their immediate point of departure. The drawings, 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.

A part of a new experimental program: Opal Spaces: Artists / Location

Quarantine Works #2 is produced as a collaboration between Opal Spaces, Julie Sass, 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 inquiries please contact: contact@opalspaces.com