Asger Carlsen

Copenhagen

Our former interviewee Asger Carslen currently holds an exhibition at V1 gallery in Copenhagen. Entitled Hester, it features his eponymous ongoing series.

Hester is not easy to explain. It has to be viewed and experienced. It is about sculptures of amorphous human figures photographed in non descript spaces. A cross between a David Lynch dream, a Henry Moore sculpture and a Francis Bacon painting, mixed by Dr. Jekyll in Frankenstein’s lab. Surreal cubistic tableaus in black and white.

The process is interesting. Seven years ago Asger Carlsen challenged himself with a new artistic task. A dogma. He had to create his new body of work in the studio. Carlsen had the notion that photography could be something else than an observation done with a camera. He would no longer roam the planet for a motif. Photography would be the material. He started shooting nude models, including himself, in the studio and building objects and merging the two digitally. The result is Hester, named after the street in New York where Carlsen has his studio, sculptures sculpted from photography and presented in the studio setting where they were created. Carlsen plays with photography in creating an open-ended interpretation of figures and shapes in departure from the traditional approach; his works are more materials than photographs, or maybe even photo-graphs of installations.

Asger Carlsen

V1

January 17 – February 15, 2014
Flaesketorvet 69. Koedbyen
1711 Copenhagen V.
Denmark

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