Art Copenhagen, Copenhagen
30 August – 1 September 2013
Vane presents work by Adam Burns, Jorn Ebner, Jock Mooney, Michael Mulvihill and Stephen Palmer at the Art Copenhagen art fair, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Adam Burns (born Stockton-on-Tees, 1987, lives in Stockton-on-Tees, UK) creates a series of complex and elusive abstract paintings, exploring both the psychology and the emotional impact of colour. Precisely executed sequences of lines derived from multiple perspective points and painted planes of colour gleam in a pure virtual space. However, a straightforward reading of the works as an homage to modernist minimalism is undermined by an impulsive, skewed geometry to the compositions and the lilting, subtle delicacy of the coloured surfaces, resulting in a series of ‘impossible spaces’ that shift between the illusive and the concrete.
Jorn Ebner (born Bremerhaven, 1966, lives in Berlin, Germany) creates imaginary realms that seem to hover somewhere between a vision of utopia and dystopia. His actions of marking and mapping in these abstracted, virtual environments are a response to place: small gestures of trespass or disruption exploring and testing basic assumptions around notions of naturalness and artificiality. Ebner’s diagrammatic renditions of landscapes and cityscapes are designed to unsettle and challenge the idea of fixed meanings and categorisation.
Jock Mooney (born Edinburgh, 1982, lives in London, UK) constructs an eclectic, unashamedly alternative view of the world. His pen and ink drawings feature distorted humans, animals and objects. It’s only when we examine them closely we see they are composed of writhing fingers and hands – as gracefully drawn as those of angels in a mediaeval manuscript – stretched out in apparent supplication, as if some of the characters in Mooney’s never-ending danse macabre have succumbed to despair, drowning in madness.
Michael Mulvihill (born Jarrow, 1973, lives in Gateshead, UK) makes drawings that are weighted with a sense of menace; his landscapes, urban scenes and portraits are all potential harbingers of disasters waiting to happen. The sense of foreboding is exacerbated by his obsessive process: images are the result of heavily worked pencil on paper, built up through repeated erasure and overdrawing, leaving a series of ‘ghosted’ images below the finished drawing itself. This process creates visions of a world that is, in the artist’s own words, ‘in the process of dissolving’.
Stephen Palmer (born Alton, 1967, lives in London, UK) has taken newspaper clippings as the subject of his most recent drawings. The stories are not strictly ‘news’ but rather look to reanalyse historic events. Each clipping is rendered in precise detail, a transcription that has the effect of conferring worth to events that may otherwise appear of little importance. Whilst the selection of stories might at first appear random – UFOs, World War Two, a chess match, stamp collecting – the topics are those that attract a fanatical and obsessive following.
Art Copenhagen is held for the 17th time and from this year with a new profile as Denmark’s new International art fair for contemporary art presenting 59 up-and-coming as well as established galleries from 15 countries, including Los Angeles, London, Singapore, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin. The art fair has developed from a national art fair to a leading Nordic Art Fair – and is now the only international art fair in Scandinavia.
Forum Copenhagen
Julius Thomsens Plads
11825 Frederiksberg C
Denmark
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