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Indepth Arts News:
"Paintings by Ann Sophie Stærk: Tiina Elina Nurminen and Identity is a Faraway Dream, You Can Buy Tomorrow"
2003-05-23 until 2003-06-28
Stalke Gallery
Copenhagen, ,
DK Denmark
It is the second time that Stalke Gallery shows the Finish painter Tiina Elina Nur-minen, who earlier this year participated in the group show Stop for a moment – painting as presence at Arken Museum of Modern Art. At a first look Nurminen’s paintings present themselves as continuations of an abstract tradition in which the characteristics of the medium, the working of the surface and the qualities of color is the focus. And as such they create a distinct visual and sensual presence. But if you allow yourself and your eyes to spend a little more time with them fragments or suggestions of figurations appear.
The abstraction turns out to contain other potentials than the formal self-referentiality. A potential for narrative? Maybe. For the poten-tial is never completely redeemed. It remains indefinite and yet concise, like memo-ries, associations, emotions or impressions. States of mind you could say. In this way the presence of the surface is charged with something intangible behind, an ab-straction of a psychological nature, which becomes al the more insistent the longer you look at the surface. Nurminen’s paintings are attempts at letting the surface ap-proach and conform to this second abstraction as its condition.
In Stalke Gallery’s project room we will show a series of paintings by Ann Sophie Stærk who last year participated in the two well received exhibitions Quirky Girls at Horsens Art Museum and ALIBI - Alle lever i byens igloer at The Free Exhibition Space.
The title of Stærk’s project, Identity is a faraway dream, you can buy tomorrow, is symptomatic for her merging of existential reflections and the logics of consumer culture. And titles are generally an important part of her paintings. As elaborate and suggestive comments to the picture plane, where a combination of traditional or everyday motives and lightly psychedelic popcolored patterns meet the eye. They create an ironic and bittersweet distance between what is seen and what is said, which indicates a more complex deeper relation between a dream universe and reality, between the world as a media created land of opportunities and a personally experienced fact. In this way Stærk’s paintings pose the question whether the perfect life style is also the perfect life.
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