Next week my new show Modern Love opens in Copenhagen. I've been working for a long time on all these new paintigs and I can't wait to show them. Of course I hope that you can come by for the opening on Friday the 26th from 17.00-20.00 at Hans Alf Gallery.
If you can't come but you want to see all the paintings you can always email me for a preview.
This summer I spent some time in Basel where I did a show at Lotsremark Projekte which is the project space of collectors and art historians Harald Kraemer and Janine Stoll. Harald Kraemer wrote the essay for my show "The World Was Weird" at Hans Alf Gallery in 2014 and through our conversations this year in Basel it became obvious to me that Harald should write the essay for Modern Love. He did, It's titled Aphrodite - Sappho - Myth and you can read it on my blog here.
And before you read on I apologise for the length of the text below. You don't have to read it all, in reality it's better to just come and have fun looking at the paintings. However there are no laws against long newsletters so I will continue.
Speaking about paintings is often one of the hardest thing for a painter to do. I love to talk about paintings but I find these new ones harder to talk about than my last shows. I will try though. The overall subject is Love and Women. I started this show autumn 2017 by doing loads of pencil drawings. At that time I didn't know that I was making a foundation for "Modern Love". I made drawings of women sleeping inside a church and I titled it "Safe From Ghouls". Ghouls are like Zombies btw. I did another one called "Hidden From The World", also women sleeping in a sort of sanctimoney. I took the women out of the drawing "Megadome Of Christ" and left God's house abandoned. (The biggest drawing). I got interested and obsessed with the subject and that lead to the show. It's not as if I actively chose the subject. A painterly subject just sort of happens. At least for me. I drew two women facing a landscape, leaning their heads towards eachother. There was a duality there. They could be sisters, lovers or friends. They look like they were sharing an emotion. That's when it all started and I realised that I was painting something I didn't understand. Nevertheless I seemed to be able to paint it - the un-understandable. That's when I started to stretch the big canvasses, the small canvasses. The fun of painting something you can not possibly be part of. It did feel like a voyeristic experience at times. The canvasses only posing questions back at me. Constant questions and mysteries. I added Unopened Loveletters, empty beds, dogs for company, moments of gazing out of windows, therapy rooms, and lots of cherries.
Around christmas time 2017 I read the Greek poet Sappho's "ode to Aphrodite". Sappho seems to be asking Aphrodite for help to make another woman love her. The power of this very old piece of text is so vivid, strong and complex. It occured to me how little is understood of love between humans.
Sappho, in the midst of her frustration calls upon her Godess to make sense of her situation, to make love fruition, to make another human understand her love. If Sappho was a friend of mine, I guess the only help I could offer her was that some things are easilier painted than understood.
I hope to see you at the opening.
thanks
Anders