Galleri Tom Christoffersen

exhibitions

Photo from Bodil Nielsen’s studio

Danish artist Bodil Nielsen opens her solo exhibition THE SUN SHINES ON BLUE SKIES at Galleri Tom Christoffersen. The new paintings present deeply rooted ornamentation and scaling with bright colours. The particular use of colours and the various sizes and formats of the canvases activate the space of the viewer.

Association relates the many paintings in a way, which is seldom seen in Bodil Nielsen’s previous production. The seriality is played down and the paintings are not organized in systematic pseudo categories. Instead they differ in scale, space, transparency, opacity, format, composition, colour scheme and technique – a multifaceted body of works that gathers as different strands of the same position in the careful installation by Bodil Nielsen. THE SUN SHINES ON BLUE SKIES enhances the possibilities to let the attention move along all possible relations between the works, which results in an ever changing overview.

Bodil Nielsen works in the open field between the formal, the ornament, nature observation and the optical effects of colours. In the new paintings an underlying grid of interlocking polygons is scaled up and down from painting to painting as it fluctuates between being a visible drawn line and a hidden structure in the materiality of the paint. The grid can be put into play with the early modernism’s emancipative use of this non-hierarchical and never-ending structure but it is also relevant in play with the decorative intensity of the ornament, which is repeated in almost all visual cultures – an intensity, which in the paintings by Bodil Nielsen creates tensions between the plane and illusory space.
The American art movement ”Pattern & Decoration” is an important reference in the production of Bodil Nielsen. In the 1970ties ”P&D” looks towards pictures made by non-western cultures and towards the arts and crafts produced by American minority settlements. For example the patterns of systematic geometry referring to the landscape and repeated through generations in the continuous making of quilted and woven fabrics. Patterns that today functions as common point of reference reproduced over time rather than a momentarily statement from an individual voice. Bodil Nielsen’s abstract painting carries the same ideal of being deeply rooted: Partly in the common and collective, partly in the basic observations of nature, distances in the landscape, a seaview – sunshine and shadow.

Bodil Nielsen studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, Copenhagen (DK) and the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht (NL), Holland. She is currently participating in the exhibition ”Sense and Sensibillity” med Malene Landgreen, Galerie MøllerWitt, Aarhus (2010). Selected previus ehibitions are: Sunchine & Shadow (Sollo), Galleri Rostrum, Malmö (S, 2010), Against the Wall, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Cph. (2009/10), OVERGADEN (solo). Overgaden, Cph. (2003). Fact & Value. Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Cph.(2000). Bodil Nielsen has conducted several large-scale commissins and is represented in many public collections.

installation views

THE SUN SHINES ON BLUE SKIES

Bodil Nielsen

Press Release in Danish (PDF)

Duration

26.03-24.04.2010

Opening

26.03.2010 at 5-8 PM

CUBE

Hanne Nielsen & Birgit Johnsen