Marlo Pascual and Sergej Jensen Open Solo Exhibitions at Aspen Art Museum

ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum’s third Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence is New York-based artist Marlo Pascual. Pascual combines glamorous photographs of women from the 1940s and 50s with found objects and light sources to create brooding, psychologically charged work. Pascual’s elegant installations and theatrical lighting—varying from old lamps and candlelight to fluorescents and colored theater gels—animate the women in the photographs, enacting the dramatic potential frozen in the still frames of a bygone era. The hope and allure of Hollywood’s past is transmuted into melancholy, reflecting the unfulfilled dreams of countless anonymous actresses and models. This will be Marlo Pascual’s first one-person museum exhibition.

The AAM Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence program furthers the museum’s goal of engaging the larger community with contemporary art. Residencies can last between forty-eight hours and two months, resulting in a new body of work exhibited at the AAM.

Marlo Pascual was born in 1972 in Nashville, Tennessee, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has had one person exhibitions at the Swiss Institute, New York, and Casey Kaplan, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; Sculpture Center, New York; White Columns, New York; and Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, Vermont. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sergej Jensen’s poetic artworks provide a fresh approach to minimalist painting. Constructed from a wide range of textiles, the artist uses additive and subtractive physical methods like bleaching, fraying, or sewing to stand in for the traditional gestures of pure painting. Through these processes, Jensen creates breathtakingly fragile and quiet abstractions that become contemplations of the history and reuse of his chosen materials, and conjure a network of visual and visceral associations from the stains, holes, cracks and other traces of use that in turn become the primary pictorial elements. His application of pigments, diamond dust, thread, wool, and bleach become part of the treatments whose effects—in some cases—can take years to fully realize. Jensen’s works are installed within the pre-existing conditions of each individual gallery space. As such, interior design elements such as rugs, couches, or other repurposed domestic objects combine to create a total and unexpected environment for the viewer.

This is Berlin-based artist Jensen’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition. It is organized in collaboration with the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and includes over 25 paintings. It will be accompanied by a monographic catalogue co-published by both institutions, with essays by Aspen Art Museum Director and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson and an interview with the artist by Kunst-Werke Institute Curator Susan Pfeffer.

Sergej Jensen lives and works in Berlin. His work has been exhibited in major international group exhibitions, including: Of Mice and Men, Berlin Biennial (2006), and the São Paulo Biennial (2004). Solo exhibitions include: Pinakothek Der Moderne (with Henrik Olesen), Munich (2008); Schmoll, Kunsthalle Bergen, Norway (2008); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2008); Nomadic bags and bag faces, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2007); Kunstverein Bremerhaven, Germany (2004); and Kunstverein Braunschweig (with Stefan Müller), Germany (2003).

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