Made together with Tine Hecht-Pedersen
Pontus Kjerrman og Tong Wang at Galerie Pi, Copenhagen 17.Nov-21.Dec 2023
A hybrid of different cultures and worlds can be experienced at the exhibition Fables and fantasies in Galerie Pi, where the two artists Pontus Kjerrman and Tong Wang, each with their own expression in the form of naïve realism and fantasy, show sculpture and painting respectively. They both draw on a mixture of new, old, western and eastern traditions and fables, often with an underlying humor that points to man’s repressed instincts and dreams. Tong Wang paints small sections of the world in his paintings. He puts the characters in situations that at first look ordinary, but often they become fragments of the reality we know and with a twist he draws us into a more magical and dreamy world, often outside the rigidity of the usual norms. In a collage of fantasies, we must use our emotions and senses, rather than rational thought. Tong Wang uses an ancient Chinese and Asian technique, the multi-perspective, in his images.
In his very own form of expression, he draws on a network of visual expressions, the ancient and the contemporary, and moves in the borderland between east and west, between the local and the global, between dream and reality, between tradition and innovation. Tong Wang himself calls his art ‘A lotus that has grown out of the mud’. This does not mean that art is simply a worship of beauty, but rather that art reveals both the exalted and the demonic, the life-affirming and the life-destroying. In his works, you can feel a deep interest in human activity in a complex world.
In his very own form of expression, he draws on a network of visual expressions, the ancient and the contemporary, and moves in the borderland between east and west, between the local and the global, between dream and reality, between tradition and innovation. Tong Wang himself calls his art ‘A lotus that has grown out of the mud’. This does not mean that art is simply a worship of beauty, but rather that art reveals both the exalted and the demonic, the life-affirming and the life-destroying. In his works, you can feel a deep interest in human activity in a complex world.
Pontus Kjerrman has created an animal party table for this exhibition. For now, as he says, it is time for the animals to skim the cream – in this fabulously rich world we live in. For the last 15,000 years, man has domesticated the animals, while the human animal has harvested the riches of nature, and fewer and fewer animals can live a free life. At the same time, the price for the development of civilization has caused a loss of instinct in man. Around the table sits a collection of mythical animals in ceramics. They are animals with very human features. The expressiveness in the figures’ positions and faces shows man and animal in one. Spirit and instinct work together in an unbreakable unity. The figures are archaic and contemporary, here at an ordinary, yet fantastic meal scenario. The animal is in visual art from Hellenism to Symbolism, used as mythical figures with various powers. Many stories say the same thing, namely that whoever has the animal with them will always succeed. The animal spirit is a quality that must be transmuted humanly. The animal lives strongly in man’s dream world – the nocturnal kind where, in crises and important transitional phases – they act as a kind of totem animal. They can restore a lost touch with instinct; a basic equipment man contains, but which is forgotten or lost along the way in the modern world. The deeper and more repressed characteristics and instincts that are involved, the further “down” in the biological hierarchy the animals are brought up, first domestic animals then predators and finally reptiles or snakes, all of which stick their heads out in Kjerrman’s works.
Cornerexhibition 2023
Corner opening
Saturday 29. April 2023 3 p.m.
Gammelgaard Art & Culturcenter, Gammel Klausdalsbrovej 436, 2730 Herlev
Every day – except monday fra 12.00 til 17.00
“The Meeting” is a sculpture which is planned to be placed at Sortedam Dossering at the end of Hedemannsgade in Copenhagen so that it will be visible to everyone who walks or cycles along the Lakes. The sculpture will be made of bronze on a staircase-like plinth approx. 2 meters high. It has arisen in dialogue with citizens in the area. Copenhagen’s Citizens’ Representation has approved the sculpture and would like to receive it as a gift, however the municipality does not have the funds for the execution and installation of the sculpture. Thanks to generous financial support from the Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen Foundation, the L.F. Foght Foundation and Alrowmedia, the project (April 15-23) is close to being fully financed. The plan is for the sculpture to be inaugurated in the summer of 2024.
Specifically, the sculpture is inspired by the Mannerist painting The Visit to an Altarpiece in the baroque church Chiesa Nuova in Rome, executed in the 1580s by the Italian painter Federico Barocci, which I became aware of at the exhibition Creation of the Work of Art at the Statens Museum for Art.
Several drawings by Barocci were shown here. The motif is so simple, Elisabeth and Maria who meet on a staircase. There is something in that meeting, the way they hold each other’s hands and look at each other that I am deeply fascinated by, the way the somewhat older Elisabeth stands at the top, expressing welcome, and Maria who steps up to Elisabeth. There is something so fundamentally simple and straightforward about their meeting. I have made several smaller sculptures where it is two mythical creatures that meet in the same way. This in a search for the most essential in the situation, where it is not important that it is two women or two important figures in Christianity who meet, but the meeting itself. To emphasize the universality of the situation, here are two mythical animals meeting each other. Since the sculpture has no plinth apart from the staircase-like granite plinth, the sculpture will be open for dialogue with the viewer who can sit on the steps and interact with the two.
link to Copenhagen Municipality webside(only danish):
Fernisering Fredag 27. Januar kl. 17:00
Udstillingsperiode:
Fredag 27. Januar til Søndag 12. Februar 2022
Sted:
Kulturcentret
Kongensgade 111
Fredericia
Åbningstider:
Tirsdag-Fredag 14-17
Lørdag 11-17
Søndag 14-17
Mandag Lukket
