Renata Maiblum Gallery in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen closed in June 2020.
The biggest thank you to the wonderful and talented artists and to all who have visited and supported the gallery.
07-28 February 2020
MAJA LINDE CHRISTENSEN: Flippant Fables
Maja Linde Christensen is a danish painter, sculptor, puppeteer and musician living and working in Copenhagen. She grew up in an artistic family, her father a musician and mother a clown, and has been drawing since the age of two. After graduating from puppet-maker school in 1998, she began working in various theatres as puppet-maker and puppeteer. Fully focused on painting and sculpture since 2013, she sometimes uses mixed media as fox jaws and lobster claws for her engaging sculptures. The main motive and source of inspiration in her practice are animals: using them to create humanlike stories based on moods and bizarre situations.
Christensen's spontaneous visual stories as such are full of humour and openness for interpretation and experience. And she uses this humour to emphasise things are as they are, and there is no need to be judgemental: or, in her own words: there is nothing really right or wrong, there only is.
(R. Maiblum)
9 - 31 January 2020
JESPER DALMOSE & LENNOX RAPHAEL - VIDEO COLLAGE
- video culturists
Life as moving pictures of Today
by J.Dalmose and L.Raphael
Looking at their slow moving pictures and listening to words created from the deep inner stream of life and tasty reality makes one realize how working together with someone, especially when a fellow artist, is a gift too of time & chance, the serendipity of interchangeable creativity made real betwixt time & being, always another opportunity to reaching out to extra dimensions of surprise; and the result surprising always too particularly since no image or texture seems taken for granted, and one is left to wonder, HOW WERE THEY DONE?
Furthermore, apart from being indefatigable workers, self-positioned in the real/unreal visual transformation of images , words & reality amounting to the art of instinct as a circuitous river, their combined work, what together they attempt, the many videos-capes since 2013, beginning with LETTERS FROM BERLIN, which led to the birth of the BERLIN SOUP ARTS FESTIVAL, tells successfully the story without stopping the flow of Interpretation. There is more to come, certainly, and one looks forward to this instant radiance of combustible innocence & contemporary interPlay under the harmonious umbrella (our multiverse). Walking, Talking, Video, Words
7- 27.December 2019
GROUP SHOW - DECEMBER 2019
- paintings, photography, prints, mixed media
Maria Konstanse Bruun
Jesper Dalmose
Paul Hartley
Ian Hoskin
Renata Ladovic Mestrovic
Pernille de la Porte Ovesen
Gina Parr
Lennox Raphael
Søren Tougaard
16 - 30 November 2019
LINDA ZIVERE: Stillness
The meditative radiance in Zivere´s paintings invites viewers to engage with their own internal space. Her calm, impulsive brushstrokes, as seen from the repetitive painting of overlapping sections or grids of colours are both calming and provocative, and indicate too a firmness of style and assurance. Also, this expression is emphasised by the bright, intense colours she uses to have these grids expanding into each other, like layers of thoughts, emotions and sensations complementing one another and knitting together an aura of quietness.
The overall calmness in Linda Zivere´s paintings stimulates too a desire to enter an inner journey. This silent seductiveness of her work comes from a skilled combination of spontaneity and disciplined rhythms of movements.
But Zivere´s paintings, combining mixtures of stillness with impulsive loudness coming from visible brushstrokes, are also full of paradox. Like a friend´s silent gaze, her work both calms and provokes.
Nevertheless, the viewer is easily absorbed by the depths of tenderness in paintings that arise from her humble, almost fragile work flow. Mostly, the experience of Linda Zivere´s paintings opens up for a personal stream inward, and allows one a moment for oneself.
Linda Zivere is a Latvian artist living and working in Copenhagen since 2001.
(R. Maiblum)
06 July - 30 August 2019
RENATA LADOVIC MEŠTROVIĆ: Extraction (Exhausting)
Series of prints, Extraction - (Exhausting), features seemingly unrelated forms: from Earth map to circles, lines, spots, and human shapes. The flatness of these forms, achieved through monochrome black, grey and vivid yellow, is periodically disturbed by chaotic lines; but, however random these carefully placed elements may appear as they stretch out of the paper format, they are not in any easily recognised relationship.
Such unrelatedness implies too a subconscious narrative: where the feeling of lack of control or relational content is feared. On the other hand, this awareness also opens the space for a sense of acceptance: that through the complexity of our sublime minds we share contextual similarities within: namely our existential linkages.
(R. Maiblum)
14 June - 4 July 2019
MARIA KONSTANSE BRUUN: Plastmosis
The exhibition Plastmosis consist of a series of photographic self-portraits and installations with found plastic objects. In the carefully staged self-portraits, the artist’s physical body is juxtaposed with plastic objects that have found their way into the artists home but plays no significant role to the artist or anyone in her family. The pairing of the plastic objects with the physical body suggest an uncanny violation of the artist’s body, questioning the uncertain nature of the boundaries and the power balance between the physical self and the artificial material society we are part of. Plastic in this instance can be read as a symbol of the times we live in.
The artist is interested in the idea that something so seemingly insignificant is becoming significant in its magnitude. We now know that our excessive consumption of goods, such as plastic, and our creation of waste products has come back to haunt us; not only is it invading and threatening the natural environment that we are dependent on for our livelihood, as well as our homes as the artist has experienced, but accumulation of nano and micro plastics through the food chain means that plastic is entering our bodies and becoming part of our physical being as well.
(M.K.Bruun)
19 October - 8 November 2019
PERNILLE DE LA PORTE OVESEN: Almost Random
Pernille de la Porte Ovesen, spent more than two decades immersed in the post-abstract expressionism scene in New York. At the beginning of the seventies she studied at The New York Studio School of Drawing,Painting, and Sculpture, an art institution founded in 1964 by American abstract expressionist painter Mercedes Matter. Apart from Matter, the faculty included, among others, Esteban Vicente, George J. McNeil, Alex Katz, Phillip Guston, George Spaventa, Sidney Geist and Nicolas Carone, all of whom had a great influence on the development of Ovesen´s own aesthetics and style.
Under the influence of this spirited New York art environment, Ovesen generated her expressive lyricism with emphasis on intensive colour and tough brushstrokes, which lent a vigorous composition to her paintings. In fact, her painterly vocabulary reflects a constancy of distinction; and the shadows of abstract expressionism, visible as reminiscences around her paintings, impending here & now, acted as a contemporary legacy. The exhibition Almost Random shows the unity of that legacy infused as it is with Ovesen´s own intimate insights. Her singulary engaging language builds on layers of painterly abstractions that allow for diverse subjective interpretations. Almost Random is a combination of older and newer works from 1990s to today where the artist´s reflections of inner and outer worlds are visible through a clear dedication to her own spontaneous expressions. Nonetheless, the seemingly random imagery in the paintings is deceptive.
Ovesen´s approach is unconstrained, but subtly articulates feelings of belonging to her own voice. This intuitive eloquence emphasise a playfulness through which the viewer can continuously engage in rediscovering Ovesen´s certainty of form, composition, and use of colour. Sharing sensibility and assertiveness, Pernille de la Porte Ovesen is an artist of masterly visual communication. She paints with a powerful tenderness that encourages viewers to read her paintings with both emotional and intellectual openness. And her personal expression filters through the viewer’s sensory experience a world of intimate vulnerability and the courage of survival.
(R. Maiblum)
17 May - 06 June 2019
GINA PARR & IAN HOSKIN: Deceived with ornament
British artist couple Gina Parr, painter & photographer and Ian Hoskin, photographer, present their latest works in Deceived with Ornament, a timely series of photographs from two months of journeying through Sri Lanka earlier this year. The photographs show their accumulated experience and perspectives from those travels. Seemingly insignificant elements of life captured on camera in abstract forms of expression bring these collected fragments together in the grid of the exhibition and create keys for understanding the unfamiliar. What follows are images both fragile and poetic, with messages of encouragement to explore behind one's own realities.
Gina Parr´s approach is a microcosm of surface, fragments of diversity founded on variety of exteriors; some human made, others adopting form by natural causes. Their very strong presence lends them the appearance of enlarged particles, those vibrant atoms of the country. The images exist by themselves, without need for definitions or description and, with their tactile and lively texture, seem as paintings. Parr removes from the viewers the possibility of knowing what the images really are; and her practice is to expose a world of illusions where the viewer self experiences the works purely by their visuality and not by their predeterminate definitions.
Ian Hoskin´s works are repetitive images of colourful circles with dark background. Their appearance of three-dimensionality and lightness remind of floating candies at amusement parks. The images are actually tyres wrapped by manufacturers in various plastic foil. With the different wrappings and logos, they compete with each other for customers’ attention. Hoskin´s simplicity of representation and his careful treatment show viewers the possibility of excavating beauty in everyday objects. Tyres possess significant importance in the life of their users. Hoskin's take here is the different attitudes we may have in relation to everyday objects at the centre of our lives.
The exhibition borrows its title from Shakespeare´s Merchant of Venice: the phrase deceived with ornament symbolically points to peoples´ tendency in making opinions based on shiny, outer appearances that differ often from inside characteristics. Both Parr and Hoskin explore the ideas of value scales and the subjectivity of perspectives based on these considerations. With this exhibition they repurpose the beauty in ordinary details and the viewer's own responsibility for seeing.
(R. Maiblum)
11 April - 03 May 2019
BILJANA STAMENKOVSKA: Reading Diary
Biljana Stamenkovska's Reading Diary is a series of prints made in drypoint technique where a needle is used to transfer visual images to a metal plate.
Reading Diary brings to light snapshot- stories engraved in copper plates. With the sharpness of the needle, Stamenkovska alludes to both pain and the stubborness of memories. The small-scale prints, sharp lines of images and inscriptions create very intimate diaries – exposed.
Also, the artist willingly gives away her intimacy, which engraves simultaneously Stamenkovskas´ personal stories into the universal memory realm, where -my story- transforms into ours.
(R. Maiblum)
09-26 February 2019
GEIR STADHEIM: Extended Landscape
Geir Stadheim is a visual storyteller. His fables, full of characters that could belong to both nightmares or joyful dreaminess, are echoes of some unknown mythologies. And it would be a challenge to fit them into a descriptive frame. Mostly because his paintings are like moving images, where numerous details display the essential strength and simulate entrance into an intimidating yet appealing world of imagination: one outside of familiar guiding rules and definitions. Stadheim’s works are rich with mixed playfulness of symbols and surreal elements, such as dark skies, large puffy clouds, naked trees, strange beings, or bizarre buildings. They encourage spectators to dive into them without presumptions. His firm brushstrokes and intense colours, together with seemingly chaotic accumulations remain connected to each other, creating auras of continuity and fluidity embedded in the paintings. It is more or less irrelevant what they really tell about. The connectivity in these works propels the spectators to the movement inward and to the feeling of connection to its own freedom of imagination. That spacial connectivity is the core of Stadheim´s visual fables, as it opens the possibility for endless interpretations. And all the variety of potential perceptions assert the relevance of an existential awareness: that is presence in any form or time, space and reality – connected. Stadheim´s paintings do not seek to be understood or interpreted. They instead encourage the spectators to rendezvous with them in the mode of their own emotional surrender.
(R. Maiblum)
09-23 December 2018
GROUP SHOW: DECEMBER 2018
GROUP SHOW December 2018 features the work of eight artists excelling in printmaking, drawings, paintings, photography, textile, and video art. They are linked by a luminosity which propels enthusiasm, diversity and intense imagination to the surface. And, as in the velocity of the year ending with its winter mist, this December drift of time is a tribute to ever-returning new beginnings.
FLORIN NEDELCU (photography)
JESPER DALMOSE (video)
LENNOX RAPHAEL(paintings)
LINDA ZIVERE (paintings)
METTE ROSENDAL ANDERSEN (textile)
PAUL HARTLEY (drawing)
RENATA LADOVIC MESTROVIC (prints)
SØREN TOUGAARD (paintings)
16 - 30 November 2018
LINDA ZIVERE: INWARD - paintings
20 – 31 October 2018
PAUL HARTLEY: VISION CONTROL
Paul Hartley’s exhibition of handmade spectacle frames in black rubber is an installation that makes us reflect on the idea of control. The small frames create a feeling of being watched, as well as highlighting our own vision; vision that is blurred without artificial help. But vision which has been blurred has also been deceived. It is vision that is controlled. It is almost impossible to escape the awareness of living under surveillance. That draws us to Michel Foucault´s theory of the Panopticon: a society controlled by surveillance. The one being controlled is not fully aware of the controller. The power of the anonymous controller gives an illusion of freedom.
Hartley´s exhibition offers a suffocating feeling of lost privacy. The spectacles hang in the space of the gallery and act like despised miniature cameras: discreet, fragile and ever-present. Just as the cameras of our society invisibly infiltrate our movements, our positions, our breath.
Accompanying the installation are smaller ink drawings of spectacle frames. The drawings are made with delicately neurotic and repetitive movements. These are the behaviours of the panopticon society. The controlled brushstrokes only appear spontaneous. In the same way, spontaneity under observation is also a contradiction.
Hartley is playing with the sameness of repetition - repetition created by the idea of surveillance and the behaviour that emerges under absolute control. In the end, Hartley’s spectacle frames are no more than small, innocent objects; ones which interrogate the boundaries of our perceptions of our own freedoms.
(R. Maiblum)
24 July - 31 August 2018
SUMMER STREAMING
Extending the idea of the previous ZERO POINT event, the gallery will continue its summer program with spontaneousness of creative process and interaction between artists and visitors.
LINDA ZIVERE: Exposed Atelier
LENNOX RAPHAEL: Blindfolded
OCTAVIAN & Cecil C. LUDVIGSEN: The Screen Between - Performance Collaboration
JULIJA BALUKEVICA: The Room / with Roman Romanov
METTE ROSENDAL ANDERSEN : 4hrs of Blindness
24 - 26 July, opening 24. at 17:00; 25-26 July 14:00 – 18:00
Mette Rosendal Andersen: 4HRS OF BLINDNESS
Through a process of repetitive prints, the artist aims towards visitors inner states of being, triggering a possibility of a new condition to arise. Structures and patterns appear, by repeating movements at the same pace.
People are often shifting focus from one thing to another, which at the same time constantly eliminates something else. This rapid focus change can be equalised to being blind four hours a day, when we actually do not really see many of the details around us.
The performance therefore aims at visitor´s focus and tranquility through concentration and attention to repetitive action, which then becomes visible on the paper / textile.
27 July – 02. August, opening 27. at 17:00; 28-02 August 14:00 – 18:00
Julija Balukevica: THE ROOM / with Roman Romanov
Creating a new space inside of an existing one, a gallery inside of a gallery, explores the interaction between not only the artist and visitors, but between spaces as well. Alluding to the inner and outer space, the artist brings into “The Room” a notion of intimacy and how we relate to it when it becomes exposed. The room exhibits a painter, Roman Romanov whose own subject of exploration is intimate relations in his private life. This multi-layered interaction aims to provoke within visitor´s explorations of their own intimate and exposed worlds, internal and external spaces.
03 – 05 August, opening 03. at 19:00; 04- 05 August 19:00
Octavian & Cecil Cathrin Augusti Ludvigsen: COLLABORATION
An artist duo perform collaborations in the moment, an undefined form of interaction between the artists. We look closely at how artists collaborate and interact between themselves and we explore what comes out of planned collaboration and spontaneous interactions. The performances improvises human conditions, were words and actions are no-longer able to capture the elusiveness of the mind. A work that will progress and transform from each performance.
07 – 08 August, opening 07. at 17:00; 08 August 17:00 – 18:00
Lennox Raphael: BLINDFOLDED – Dedicated to Lars Kræmmer
Painting on the spot, blindfolded, brings into light the very essence of where creativity comes from. It´s a is a mind-created form, an emotional reaction to the inner and external worlds, or a combination of both. The artist challenges himself by deliberately leaving out the external element, keeping it passive, activating only the inner mode of his spontaneous creation in the moment.
Lars Kræmmer did a similar performance a couple of years back, he drew croquis of a model, while blindfolded, to an audience of one. Lennox, who was, inspired by this process, wrote a book of poetry on the spot.
11 – 31 August, opening 11. at 13:00; 12-31 August 12:00 – 18:00
Linda Zivere: EXPOSED ATELIER / Florin Nedelcu: CYCLE OF TRANSITION - FRAGMENTS
Bringing the act of creating into the gallery, visitors are invited to witness the existence of an artist´s atelier. An action, movement, stagnation, silence, as well as noise and many other descriptions, which can be attributed to the atelier. When seemingly nothing or something is happening, which could just as easily be destroyed in the moment after, exposing to the public the process of creation in the moment it happens.
(R. Maiblum)
29 June 2018
ZERO POINT: Empty walls vernissage, or what to do when there is nothing to look at
The Gallery is proud to present ZERO POINT event, hosting a group of artists who are neither represented by their works nor through a verbal presentation. They are representing themselves through their own spontaneous individuality.
ZERO POINT aims to challenge the audience expectations of an art exhibition. The absence of visual experience of art works brings into the focus artists pre-given identity and their mostly unfamiliar individuality. When the visual representation is taken away, the viewers can closer experience the sense of being at the art gallery, surrounded by overall unpredictability and emerging spontaneity.
The concept interrogates the relationship between artists and their work. Asking questions that consider what their role is in front of an audience and if their identity is still the same when some of the known components attached to their identification is lacking. How artists exists without immediate connection to their works.
Traditional conception of artist and spectator behaviour patterns in the art gallery are challenged by removing the conventional and predetermined idea of an art exhibition. Artists are free to (re)present themselves by being or doing whatever feels natural for them at any given moment during the event.
ZERO POINT recognises a need to define. And it gives a space to explore an experience without predetermined rules of relation between artists, artworks, spectators and the gallery space; it gives the freedom to feel and experience either of it on its own terms.
ZERO POINT implies a starting point for a free choice of interpretations and creative action. It is a platform of interaction between expectations, established opinions and unpredictability, a starting point of a free creative act initiated by a spontaneous interaction. - Renata Maiblum
