Stalke Gallery hereby has the pleasure of opening an exhibtion of new paintings by Hans Peterson and, in the Project Room, Jonas Hvid Søndergaard. The exhibtions both continue until February 14, 2004. Hans Peterson shows five large paintings where he works with identity and perception as overall themes. Jonas Hvid Søndergaard shows new paintings made especially for the Project Room.
Peterson explores identification by combining figurative and abstract elements. Dispersed on the canvases one recognises a house or a human figure, while other areas remain undefined, coloured shapes. The recognisable objects are often borrowed from other sources, such as scantily clad amazons from kitsch cartoon books, where Peterson changes the context and thus displaces identity.
Thus Peterson examines our perception of identity, and questions the self-assured judgement of what one sees. He takes motifs from gothic stories à la Edgar Allan Poe andSherlock Holmes or the adventure world of cartoon books. These fascinating universes are pulled intoPeterson’s explorations of how recognition and identity are determined when he gives these figures a new context, new surroundings that question their identity by concealing their origins. Peterson uses the characters’ stereotypes to investigate identity, and removes the security of identification, breaking down an apparently simple world perception and showing that it is a fragile, constructed universe.
On the side in the Project Room
Jonas Hvid Søndergaard starts out with photographs of interiors and exteriors, and makes digital sketches based on the photographs that are overlapped and fragmented until the result is an almost abstract landscape. Trees, stairs, windows and paving are used almost as graphic elements in a space where form, plane, space and colour play together. A recognisable reality is suggested, but at the same time the separate fragments live their own abstract life.
Hvid delves deep into his own techniques by animating the creation of the paintings he shows in the exhibition in a new film. In the film he uses the physical space of the Project Room, bringing it to life, and illustrating what it would be like if the elements in the paintings could fly freely about. In the paintings he creates abstraction from figurative elements, while in the film he does the opposite, and shows the figuration that the paintings’ abstraction comes from. With the animated film he focuses on what is ”on the side”, what normally is outside the frame, what is never painted.
IMAGE
Jonas Hvid Sondergaard
2003
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