Nextlevelcopenhagenportfolionovember2012

Portfolio Review Jakob Hunosøe Myne Søe-Pedersen Lykke Andersen Johan Rosenmunthe Marianne Vierø Lone Erikson

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Rajesh Punj is a London-based art critic, correspondent, curator and collector of contemporary works, with a specialist interest in modern and contemporary art from India, Pakistan, China and the Middle East.

He works for a private art dealer and teaches Art and Architectural History. He writes extensively on the emerging markets for publications that include Deutsche Bank Art Mag (Berlin), Flash Art International (Milan), Asian Art newspaper (London) and Take magazine (New Delhi) among others.

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Portfolio Review

Jakob Hunosøe’s works On Ordinary Things (2010) are an endearing set of images that are as much ‘eureka’ moments of preposterous design, as they are sophisticated configurations of form, colour, line and pattern. The idleness of his objects is completely thrown by his deft interventions that juxtapose very simple things: one upon another. Like a series of tricks or one-liners that epitomise much of contemporary art, in this instance, Hunosøe uses interior design techniques to enliven the play and alteration of what is fashioned from routine materials. An orange placed at the centre of a reflective metal bowl is engulfed by its own reflection, as the bowl rests on a flat surface that is decorated with a series of thin lines. This makes for a surreal configuration of forms over patterns. Tap water pouring out from one sink into an adjoining sink reveals a sharp water jet bouncing from one domestic marble basin into another. Again, the beautiful routine of this utility is subverted by the artist’s intervention. Upon closer inspection, Hunosøe appears to want the water to mimic the staircase rooted outside the window, and within that the white marble sink appears to reflect the white window frame, in terms of its compositional forms. Dishrags appear animated as they have unceremoniously curled up and congealed from lack of moisture, like two biomorphic forms procreating.

Clinical shades of green, yellow, and a washed-out blue are the principle colours that define this image. A volley-ball hangs or hovers, depending on which way you look at it, over a varnished wooden floor in a room mostly in the dark but tellingly lit by a warm ray of sunlight, turning the floor and the unanimated ball into light-blubs. A red teapot, previously smashed into pieces, is crudely reassembled with a series of cream coloured plasters, and placed on painted floorboards.

Hunosøe’s simple compositions encourage a rare sensitivity for utensils that otherwise go unnoticed.

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Jakob Hunosøe is a photo-artist who lives and works in Copenhagen.

He graduated with an MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Hunosøe is represented by Peter Lav Gallery.

1 Toilet-roll loosened, 2010 2 Reflection of an orange in metal bowl, 2010 All Archival Fiber Print 40 x 40 cm, Edition of 5 Courtesy of Peter Lav Gallery

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Portfolio Review

Myne Søe-Pedersen’s Landscapes of Time is a deliberately empty work of configurations of blank spaces; scored, torn and tarnished walls, boards and desktops, that without content, appear like utilitarian epitaphs. Two chalk boards, Untitled (Blackboard #1, #2), that have been loosely brushed over retain the slight remnants of previous incarnations of chalk marks. This, and the previous work comprising circular chalk marks, recalls the hedonistic works of American artist Cy Twombly (1928-2011): for all his gestural frustrations.

Untitled (Pinboard) is another work that is worthy of its headier associations with something else entirely. This holeriddled soft-wall, where once pins have rested, resembles a configuration of black stars in a white sky. The close-up of the same work is more brutal. The pinholes are sharper, deeper and more damning; like bullet-holes, recalling the sandblasted exterior walls of any of the major cities of the Arab spring. New York Wall #2 is a more haunting work, of an off-white wall with a hairline crack that runs corner to corner of the image, from bottom-left to top-right. A tiny black pin still hangs, middle-top, where a shield-shaped trophy appears to have hung for a prolonged period of time. Its removal leaves the faint outline, ghost-like, of the object. Its removal amounts to the end of something. New York Wall #1 reads similarly. A slight halo appears to hang on this discoloured wall where a small print or photograph once hung – of people, of a place that mattered to someone for a brief moment in time – before the natural transition of time moved everything on to its ultimate destination.

Myne Søe-Pedersen is a photo-artist who lives and works in Copenhagen.

She studied at Cooper Union School of Art, New York and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.

Søe-Pedersen’s work has featured in various solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe.

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1 Untitled (Pinboard), 2008 80 x 100 cm, C-Type print Courtesy of Galerie Van Gelder-Amsterdam 2 New York Wall #1, 2012 50 x 60 cm, C-Type print

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Portfolio Review

Lykke Andersen’s photo-works have a Nordic edge to them; interiors and exteriors that are characteristically cold. Andersen appears to have a healthy preoccupation with museums and the laboured layout of interiors that go untouched. Nationalmuseet 1, 2 and 3 are examples of Andersen’s interest in uninhabited interiors. The lights have gone out and the museum appears to have been closed for hours. Andresen returns to photograph these interiors, and they begin to resemble macabre settings for unsolicited acts of violence. More than that, their silence and lack of activity make them attractively moody; as if history sleeps when we retreat.

Rød Gjengivelse is another set of prints of museum interiors; resembling the dining room and dressing room of a regal doll’s house, this work is regulated by its utter detachment from the presence of any kind of reality. It isn’t until looking at Naturally and the two photo-works – The Fox and Vinterfugle – that you get the measure of Anderson’s work and her considered interest in reconstructed realities and their relationship to what is real. The series, Episode, is another surreal work. A stuffed deer’s head is pinned to a tree in a lush green forest. In Episode 2, what might appear as a real deer confronts the deer head in a moment of perverse suggestion.

Lykke Andersen is a photo-artist who graduated from The Royal Danish Art Academy. Her works have been showed in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Denmark and abroad. Andersen has also published two books: Scenes and Scenery and and landscape.

1 Episode #1, 2005 Lambda print, 110 x 130 cm 2 Episode #2, 2005 Lambda print, 110 x 130 cm 3 Wagon, 2005 Lambda print, 110 x 130 cm All prints are edition of 5

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Portfolio Review

Johan Rosenmunthe’s photographs are intriguing for their associations with reality. Enlargements (2011) is a haunting exploration of a cityscape, and the impossible panoramic tranquillity that is supposed to occur when looking over vast distances. Manhattan in black-and-white reads like a nostalgic image of the capital in the 1950s or 1960s, when America epitomised a glorious, hedonistic age of innovation and ambition on a grand scale. For Rosenmunthe, the intrigue comes about when going over the city with a magnifying glass, looking into office windows and peering over the ledges and edges of these glass and concrete tower blocks. What makes his work engaging is his contrived introduction of people in the corners and crevasses of the high-rises, recalling the apocalyptic scenes of men and women jumping from the Twin Towers as a consequence of the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001. The detail of a man hovering over a rooftop is eerily unsettling, as is the woman crouching in a corner – possibly in retreat. Another, of a nun standing on a balcony with the intention of jumping, turns this arresting image on its head and Manhattan, for Rosenmunthe, becomes the scene of something else entirely. Off II (2010) is another of Rosenmunthe’s series that is intellectually problematic due to the heavily-pixellated figures: a father and child facing in opposite directions, an agitated man on the grounds of an office building. A close-up of a figure against a pinkish wall proves the most engaging of all, due to its references to contemporary aesthetics and the erosive re-representation of reality in our many immediate communicative forms. An explanation of the series, provided on Rosenmunthe’s website, reads thus: ‘the project looks directly at the dichotomy of digital and analogue processes, juxtaposing one against the other, and challenges viewers to make sense of what seems like a fractured image. The images themselves provide scenes of isolation and loneliness, as the characters within are so seemingly detached from their environment’.

Johan Rosenmunthe is a photo-artist who lives and works in Copenhagen.

He studied at Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art Photography, and has exhibited in Europe as well as publishing books and being exhibited online internationally.

Rosenmunthe is the co-founder of publishing house and exhibition platform, Lodret Vandret.

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1 Enlargements #20, 2011 Archival pigment print, 100 x 143 cm 2 Enlargements #24, 2011, Archival pigment print 100 x 70 cm

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Portfolio Review

Marianne Vierø’s photo-works amount to a repetitive reproduction of what appears to be a sample brick wall.

An installation of some twelve, possibly fourteen C-Type prints of a freestanding wall on a roll of corrugated card is as banal as it is oddly engaging. Yet such an arrangement of brick and card suggests that this might be something else entirely; on closer inspection it does appear that what resembles a solid wall might, in fact, be a cardboard replica that Vierø has laboured over in order that it suggest bricks and mortar.

Marianne Vierø is a visual artist who lives and works in Copenhagen.

Vierø was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam between 2008-09 and at Triangle Arts Association, NYC, in 2011.

Her work has recently been presented at Henningsen Gallery, Copenhagen, PAKT and Ellen de Bruije Projects, Amsterdam, and Self Service Open Art Space, Stuttgart.

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1 Arrangements of Beautiful Resemblance, August Rasmussen, 2007 2 Arrangements of Beautiful Resemblance, TTT, 2007 All Analogue C-Type print mounted on MDF, 120 x 95 cm Courtesy of the artist and Ellen de Bruijne Projects

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Portfolio Review

Lone Eriksen’s photo-works are choreographed images of decayed and dilapidated objects, collectively recomposed as surreal photo-works: a wall riddled with cracks, a decaying stench of damp and watermarks. One image depicts leaves resting at the base of this wall, a pool of grey sand, a plaster bottle on its side and – most puzzling of all – a length of green fabric pushed, at one end, into a plastic bottle and, at the other, laid out and rising up the fractured wall. Another image is of a pebble–dashed wall, a big part of which has fallen away to reveal the concrete damp beneath. And, another reveals a sewing machine positioned centre stage on a layer of snow with what appears to be a frozen rat, exposed and upsidedown, by its side. More inviting is Headboard, another exterior photo-work depicting a kitsch headboard, removed from its bed and placed against a discoloured concrete wall. Its distinctive shape is mirrored by Eriksen’s use of grey sand cradled on a floor of red leaves. Finally, a stained ironing board is upturned against a concrete wall, with Eriksen’s signature use of grey sand, and set on a bed of pinkish leaves and foliage.

Lone Eriksen is a photo-artist who lives and works in Denmark.

She has an MA in Image and Communications from Goldsmiths University and a BA(Hons) in Photography from the London College of Communication.

1 Headboard, 2012 2 Sewingmachine, 2011 3 Milkbottle and Pillow Case, 2011 All C-Type print, 61 x 50.8 cm

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