New paintings and performative photographs by Dorte Jelstrup at Galeri Lars Olsen

COPENHAGEN.- The exhibition “There must be an angel playing with my heart” presents a series of new paintings and performative photographs that thematizes subjective mental states of longing, desire, dream and remembrance. The paintings and photographs establish a link to the art historical modernism, primarily early avant-garde movements of the twentieth century such as Constructivism and Surrealism in a critical reflection upon the marginalization of modernism of a personal based world of experience and a feminine artist subject.

The paintings come in two parts: The first part consists of a series of works that are frontally and symmetrically composed and made up of wide black satin ribbons generating drawings that symbolically connote openings. Some of the fields delineated by the satin ribbons on these paintings are painted in a variety of magenta, purple, violetblue, gray and grayblack colors. Other fields remain unpainted so that ungrounded ground of linen is seen. These paintings refer to states of longing, dream and desire and confront a modernist and constructivist tradition of painting with bodily and personal references.

The second part of the paintings is centered around a theme of light which is associated with an imaginary male Other who may or may not be located in a transition zone between the real and the extraterrestrial. These paintings are asymmetrically composed of wide black satin ribbons generating crystalline forms painted in greenyellow, gray and bright emerald green colors in such a way that the painted fields appear as light beams and flashes of light, and larger forms painted in gray, grayblack, dark purple and grayblue colors bearing references to a personal universe of remembrance, experiences of loss, darkness and death. Some of the generated forms again appear unpainted so that the tactile texture of the ungrounded linen appear.

The performative photographs of the exhibition relate to Surrealism. The photographs are in black and white and show a feminine subject constituted by the artist herself who in a theatrical costume performs a series of bodily postures with references to dance and movements of longing. The performative photographs recirculates Surrealism’s interest in mental states such as dream and desire in a contemporary potentiation of embodiment, performativity and a feminine artist subject.

The exhibition is on view at Galeri Lars Olsen from January 14 through February 18, 2012.

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