Sylvester Hegner (DK), Peter Larsen (DK), Jeanette Sætre (NO)

Things as Faces. Faces as Things

October 23rd – November 20^th, 2010

Opening friday October 22nd, 5-7 pm

It is a great pleasure to introduce three new, young artists: Jeanette Sætre, Sylvester Hegner and Peter Larsen with the group exhibition Things as Faces, Faces as Things. The three artists explore independently the importance of the forming structures behind things that surround us. The meaning and identity of the shape itself is taken up for discussion in the works questioning whether it is form or content that is signifyer. A common feature in the works is also the question of who and what defines significance.

Jeanette Sætre’s poetic drawings and installations often contain displacements between the works’ literary source and it’s visual expression. The work "Werther is Unable to draw (Lotte)" is based on Goethe’s novel from 1772 and explores the conflict between story and image by showing fragmentary passages about art and love that literally forms a lack of representation as a description of love seems impossible. A consisting feature in Sætre’s work is a ”feeling of inadequacy”, meaning that things can not be expressed in only one way, but have to involve several possible standpoints formally and contentwise. This statement is also to be found in the drawings based on the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf’s life and stories.

Sylvester Hegner’s work revolves around the relationship between object and space. He is like Sætre concerned about the relationship between meaning and form, but on a more conceptual level, where the preface of figure and space is pursued. This way of approaching absense and transformation of meaning itself is seen in "Forms Encircle Entering Light", that investigates the arising of meaning. The piece "A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is not" forms itself around an open and a closed form and defines the “thing” as the title says (a negation of itself). In other words, Hegner explores genesis and forming of the meanings that we attatch to figures, spaces and objects. At the same time he searches for a prenarrative level in the pictures where figure and space are not included in narrative connections, but are studies of how stories and meanings occur and transform.

Peter Larsen’s work is like Hegners figurative, but contains often recognisable historical and cultural references. Common for the two, is the occupation of the meanings that changes and displaces over time. The theme is illustrated by Larsen through the image anarchy of surf-culture, where meanings quickly transform and get included in changing contexts. A classic portrait of John F. Kennedy inserted in a collage is an example of how a portrait detaches as a genre, and focuses on image as a collective memory. The drawing ”The Ground Zero of Sitespecificity” shows a monolith in a vast moonscape and points out the question about the origin of meaning and space.

Jeanette Sætre (b. 1983) graduated from The Royal Academy in Copenhagen this year. Peter Larsen (b. 1984)  is a student at the Graphic department at The Royal Academy in Copenhagen, and Sylvester Hegner (b. 1985) is a student of Tal R at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany.