Reviews

Camouflaged signals, adventure, and architectural melodrama in three Copenhagen galleries.

Thomas Bang, New wall works, Stalke Galleri, Vesterbrogade 15

He usually lets them creep along the floor, stretch up walls, and then bend down as tracks and shine out into the room. But this time, Thomas Bang stays nicely on the wall. The series of new objects all hang on nails, and they stay there! But the seemingly apparent clarity, based on placement and wall solidity, quickly disappears as you start examining the objects more closely.

Thomas Bang has always managed to make you open your eyes wide. He is one of those who show the way for sculpture. Therefore, it is not surprising—he has his American connections in order—that he participates in the inauguration of a new contemporary art wing at The Morris Museum outside New York.

What do we see at Stalke? Yes, the words cannot become anything other than exterior chatter. But to the point: signals. The exhibited objects contain a series of forms and materials we know and that serve a function. But these prototype forms are combined, just as unknown forms are added, and strange new functions arise. When Thomas Bang additionally refines his play with camouflage paint's blurring effects, a highly multi-layered sculptural language emerges.

A propeller is a propeller, but it’s not that simple for Thomas Bang. Partly, the artist only uses a fragment of a propeller, and partly he combines it with a large shell form and a red circle. The beauty of the object is evident. More warlike potency emerges in “Instrument with camouflage III.” Projectiles from the World War stick out of something that could look like part of a playground swing. Mysteriously, at the very top, on a small podium, small gypsum clumps are placed. —The air displaced by the object, and the energy that the object draws into the room, spreads into the viewer, who allows it to be fertilized by their own associations

by Ole Nørlyng

A World Full of Paradoxes

Thomas Bang leads the viewer into the world of paradox, subtlety, and narrative.

Art

By Ingrid Fischer Jonge

With Thomas Bang's exhibition at Stalke Gallery, we are firmly guided into a world full of paradoxes, hints, references – but also into a narrative.

Years ago, Thomas Bang worked with painting, but soon after concentrated for nearly a decade on sculptural expressions. In recent works, the focus has shifted from floor to wall.

The traditional sculpture on the floor engages in dialogue with the surrounding space. Even though Thomas Bang's sculptures exist in space, they are influenced by and in tension with the wall, where they appear as flattened forms. This gives the works a compressed and distinct sculptural quality. It emphasizes the wall's function as a support for the individual sculpture, and the wall is thus made visible as an active partner in the sculptural expression, where the traditional spatial dialogue is fixed.

But the interaction does not stop there. There is also an interplay between sculpture and wall as a flat surface. The sculpture extends outward into space and forces the viewer to reorient and change position. The sculpture and its almost overwhelming impact are perceived as a constant transformation, where the physical form does not allow itself to be fixed but instead grows out of the wall surface around it.

The individual works are built of constructed fragments, often painted wood and veneer, which signal functions, though they are never quite fulfilled. At first, associations seem to be at play, but as a story slowly emerges, it is not the original references in the sculpture that insist. In the sculptural fragments, traces of war iconography can be sensed, e.g., sandbags and camouflage coverings. From tackling modern sculptural form issues, the exhibition transforms into a narrative about the all-devastating technological war that eventually casts the darkness of death over civilization. The exhibition's final sculpture visualizes the catastrophe as an ellipse-shaped black coupling, intersected by a short and simple white cross.

However, one is not overwhelmed by this exhibition, which also, by chance, recalls the early 80s art. Thomas Bang has no desire for an outdated discussion of aesthetic reflection, resolved in artistic expressions of closed circles. There is a new tone in this artist's art. He dares to point to an era where image art can take a societal and political stance. Thomas Bang's cohesive exhibition emerges as a sharp and highly engaging commentary on a critical contemporary situation.