Reviews

Nina Steen Knudsen
at
Galleri Stalke

Galleri Stalke is led and run by Sam Jedig and Joachim Rothenborg. Sam Jedig, 31 years old, started in the gallery business at an early age. Already in 1983, he opened a gallery in Admiralgade. In 1984, he expanded with an art store, where he began to follow the pulse of the art scene. Later, he expanded further with Galleri Sub Set in Nørregade, which he later changed to Galleri Nørregade. Sam Jedig spent considerable time there, which he learned a lot from and gained a great deal of recognition.

During this period, he met Joachim Rothenborg, who had just returned home from the USA, where he trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The two teamed up and opened a joint gallery on October 1, 1987, called Galleri Stalke. The name comes from the title of a Soviet film by Andrei Tarkovsky. “Stalker” means an explorer or a guide in motion. Galleri Stalke symbolizes the efforts to preserve art, to protect its environment, opportunities, and dreams, by making it available to people.

The ordered concept for Galleri Stalke is the communication of Danish art abroad. At the beginning, this was difficult because the international scene did not know much about Danish art. Danes have never been very good at getting noticed outside the country’s borders.

Among others, Galleri Stalke works to make known and highlight artists like Joachim Rothenborg, who, as the gallery's artistic ambassador, establishes contacts, arranges exhibitions abroad with the Danish artists, and collaborates with international galleries. Stalke also works with both established Danish and foreign artists, such as Thorbjørn Lausten, Søren Mørch, Margrethe Sørensen, Torben Ebbesen, Thomas Bang, Nina Steen Knudsen, and William Anastasi, among others. Torben Ebbesen represents Danish art at the upcoming Venice Biennale, which opens on November 17, while Thomas Bang represents Danish art in New York for the American Scandinavian Foundation.

From October 13, the gallery will exhibit Nina Steen Knudsen. Nina Steen Knudsen is a promising young artist. She has not been tied to a gallery for long, but she has gone through her processes. She started her first art pieces by working with installations and sculptural objects, which often emphasized physical proximity.

Later, she worked more with objects on the wall. Neon, leather, and animals are materials that have become vital for her to grasp the space. Through her images, she draws us to the unknown. They look back at us and challenge our gaze. We are drawn to them because they are alive and visible. She moves between past and present, seeking the Western culture where images come to light, where history has merged with modern life. She touches something we carry from our childhood, while at the same time connecting us to the future. Her latest work is characterized as still-life paintings and oil works.

Nina Steen Knudsen’s exhibition at Galleri Stalke focuses on the female protagonist in Sophocles’ tragedy “King Oedipus.” The exhibition includes oil paintings, gouaches, and illustrations for Søren Ulrik Thomsen's new translation of “King Oedipus.”

Following that will be an exhibition by Thomas Bang, the Danish/American internationally recognized artist. He has been exhibiting sculptures in New York since 1970 and has had countless solo exhibitions. His installations are characterized by a steady balance that transitions into a breaking point.

He deals with the relationship between the visible and the invisible.

This exhibition starts on October 3.

Galleri Stalke is driven by love for the art world and undertakes demanding artistic assignments. The gallery provides an economic base for future exhibitions. Sam Jedig believes that a combination of commercial instinct and artistic love is necessary, which many galleries forget.

By Charlotte Breum

Ornament and history. The city is full of paintings

It increasingly concerns Nina Sten-Knudsen, who at the moment—in connection with her illustrative work for the publication of Jørgen Mejer's and Søren Ulrik Thomsen's translation of Sophocles' "King Oedipus"—is showing the exhibition "Iokaste" at Stalke Gallery. If the gallery had not revealed the title, I don't think anyone would have guessed it.
It is not about Iokaste in another sense than the tragedy's fundamental contrast between human beings, fate, and law. The theme is thus the metaphysics of alienation, which has long haunted Nina Sten-Knudsen, most recently demonstrated impressively in Kunstforeningen's large exhibition a year and a half ago.
Unfortunately, it cannot be said that Nina Sten-Knudsen fulfills the expectations that could be harbored before this exhibition, ultimately reaching the heights of the best paintings from there. Even if the metaphysical theme is, as is well known, inexhaustible

delightful, it shows its limits when it is not concretized in images, when it fully concentrates on something individual but is caught within the overarching aura or "Stimmung" (mood) of the thematic piece.
There is simply too much Stimmung and too little eventfulness in Nina Sten-Knudsen's newest paintings.
The problem is that she masters this mood all too well; it becomes style, and when art becomes style, then perhaps it is time to say it needs to change style—or rather not:
It is time again to let the painting take its starting point in what cannot be mastered.
Whether one likes it or not, it seems to be one of art's unfortunate laws that what can be done, must not be done.
The exhibition includes one painting that clearly stands apart from the rest.
"Sammensværgelse" (Conspiracy) it is called, and it is made in a statuesque and simplified, almost sculptural language—with allusions to surrealism.
Here she paints emptiness with strength; it is almost as if she has turned the longing toward Wiig Hansen and shows us the body as abandoned and petrified.
Maybe it is from here that the story should continue.

Poul Erik Tøjner

Painterly Myths

Iokaste

It is the time of myths. On stage, on film, and on canvas. Nina Sten-Knudsen has, through a natural progression, shifted from Hopi Indians and other ethnographic elements to Greek nemesis. It is she who, in stark black and white, illustrated Søren Ulrik Thomsen's retelling of Sophocles’ famous Oedipus—currently showing at Stærekassen—and now, at Vesterbro, we see, in addition to her book contribution, ten large mythological landscapes where the focus has moved away from the play’s titular character to the woman Iokaste.

The sarcophagus, the ruined city, conspiracies, and crossroads. Physical and mental knots in every human life transplanted into the landscape of dreams. The effect is virtuous in the crossroads’ transparent blue, and the placement of the red sun is mysterious. Or the skeletal shape of the coffin surrounded by strange symbols, all painted with a distinctive metallic sheen.

Nina Sten-Knudsen has more than a grasp of primal forms such as dark spaces with openings toward the light, shadows as projections, infinite horizons, etc. It is impressively done, but the more substantial work falls short on the surface. It struggles to convince of the tragedy’s dimensions. At the moment, Nina Sten-Knudsen is simply too skilled.

Ole Nørlyng

Berlingske Tidende

The Disappearance of History

Nina Sten-Knudsen's new paintings contain echoes of a Greek tragedy

Nina Sten-Knudsen. Iokaste. Galleri Stalke, Vesterbrogade 15. Until October 13.

ALTHOUGH HISTORY PAINTING in its old-fashioned sense has long since lost its primacy as a genre, modern artists have occasionally tested their strength with this remnant of the past.

Here in Denmark, no one has done so more prominently than Nina Sten-Knudsen, who during the 1980s established herself with paintings where history emerged—not as heightened action but as remains, as driftwood. Faint fragments of forgotten alphabets, wild wolves, and sparse beams of light in disorienting spaces gave her early works a ritualistic character, which at times flirted with cliché—either intentionally or not.

In her latest paintings, currently exhibited at Galleri Stalke, Nina Sten-Knudsen has drawn inspiration from the currently theater-relevant tragedy Oedipus. As the exhibition title suggests, she does not focus on the ill-fated king himself but rather on his wife and mother, Iokaste, a figure who naturally holds a central place in the tragedy yet plays a relatively insignificant role in the unfolding action.

Iokaste does not appear as a recognizable figure in Sten-Knudsen's images. Instead, she relates to the double roles that Oedipus and especially Iokaste inhabit: they are both actors and paralyzed pawns in an inescapable game of fate.

What drives this story is an invisible, non-figurative dimension; it is fate that ensures the visible figures do not determine the course of history or its outcomes.

In STEN-KNUDSEN'S paintings, human figures—left in vast, desolate landscapes—are burdened by dramatic light-and-shadow effects and a diagonal perspective that imbues them with narrative weight. In stark contrast to classical history paintings, where the climax usually reaffirms the superiority of subjects—through treaty signings, oath-taking, stoic suicide, sentencing, etc.—here, humanity exists only as its own shadow. History is neither heroic nor meaningful, merely temporally extended, devoid of logical sequences of events.

Sten-Knudsen draws heavily on Romantic and metaphysical painting, ranging from Piranesi through Turner, Friedrich, and Böcklin to de Chirico, all of whom worked with the tension between the intangible present of events and time’s relentless erosion of forms into the past and absence.

The image of the lone rider on a scorched plain or the cloaked violinist in a rocky landscape resonates heavily with death and loss, as if the progression of history is a perspective that pulls events and figures into itself, preventing them from ever occurring in a pure present.

“Skillevej” (Crossroads) is the title of a large, bluish landscape, painted loosely. Through what may be snow- and ice-covered cliffs, a path runs that appears to split at the foot of a mountain. Yet, just to the left of the fork, a fiery red sphere cuts through and vibrates intensely on the surface of the painting. The same conditions recur in other Sten-Knudsen paintings. Red and blue stripes escape the tyranny of perspective, marking a kind of history's negative highlights—a rupture of ahistorical eventfulness, if such a thing is even possible.

The TWO sarcophagus paintings are somewhat different. A pattern of symbols forms a flat base for a loosely contoured sarcophagus, whose opening (in “Sarcophagus – Open”) is covered in light-reflecting silver leaf, alternating between spatial depth and opacity. As much as the idea is good, the worn and mundane rune-like symbols surrounding the sarcophagi undeniably strip some of the power from the paintings.

Overall, Nina Sten-Knudsen has the clear problem of overplaying her effects to sharpen contrasts. It is as if the landscapes cannot be empty or pathos-laden enough, and the color stripes not striking enough.

Pay particular attention, therefore, to the two paintings “Skillevej” and “Sammensværgelse” (Conspiracy). Here, she has not needed to cite Romantic painting or apologetically present it as a Böcklin cliché but has chosen a more formal approach to a negative history painting in continuation of studies started by the American Barnett Newman 50 years ago.

By Mikkel Bogh

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