Stalke Out Of Space

When Stalke Gallery began its operation in 1987, the idea was to create an alternative to existing galleries and art institutions in Denmark. We wanted to convey national and modern international art, to create contact and knowledge across established boundaries.

Stalke Gallery was recognized as a mediator of art, a concept, a method, an institution. Galleries have now reached a point where their institutionalization has developed to the extent that it undermines the process of mediation and the artistic expression itself.

The project that replaces Stalke Gallery's traditional operation, Stalke Out Of Space, aims to make the gallery institution more visible in itself and its presence. The fixed gallery format is replaced by art spaces that are not defined as physical spaces in traditional terms: museums, art collections, and galleries. They symbolize and activate already-established art forms. Instead, it becomes a flexible operation. Stalke Out Of Space moves its focus as an institution from room to space, where gallery institutionalization is displaced to focus on the individual room, its significance, and its forum, as well as the artists' use of it.

In the relationship between gallery and artist, a different, unconventional form of collaboration becomes necessary, as the aesthetic as well as commercial frameworks for each exhibition must be built from the ground up. The artist's work thus becomes part of the gallery's operation. And conversely: the gallery institution becomes part of the exhibited art.

Our aim with the project Stalke Out Of Space is to create an alternative exhibition format – alternative for both artists, the audience, and art mediators.

Sam Jedig

Stalke Out Of Space

Stalke Out Of is a unique construct on the Danish art scene. The concept for Stalke Out Of Space was created as a rupture with the traditional, rigid forms of exhibition and representation practiced by galleries—a framework to which art has generally been forced to submit.

The concept came into existence as the result of one man’s vision—Sam Jedig’s—but also as a natural link in a process that met the demands of the time to redefine the role of art in society.

Several tendencies have intersected and amplified one another: Since the breakthrough of modernism in the mid-19th century—with Édouard Manet as its leading figure—progressive art has, more or less deliberately, turned its back on its audience. To an increasing extent, it has become elite art for an elite audience. Art is no longer created for an "external audience," but rather for oneself and one’s peers. However, the loss of wealthy patrons and its bourgeois audience has made art proletarian. As a consequence, almost no artist in Denmark can make a living from their art alone—at least not art that requires exhibition. Artists sustain themselves through commissioned decoration work, teaching, or night shifts at the post office.

This situation, however, grants the artist a new creative freedom: when he or she cannot sell their work and does not rely on it for a living, there is no longer a need to create objects designed for sale or to exhibit in commercial galleries.

In a society of material abundance, where advertising agencies and tourist brochures glorify beautiful and perfect images such as sunsets, splendid landscapes, idyllic nature, and beautiful bodies, these motifs have almost become reprehensible. They are now viewed as postcard-like and sentimental. Traditional aesthetics have been replaced by a preference for what was once considered ugly and poor—for the worn-out and overlooked: an aesthetic of decay.

This tendency is amplified by the proletarian status of the artist, and as a result, much of the most important progressive art today is created and exhibited in empty warehouses or condemned buildings. Necessity becomes a virtue.

The de-commercialization of art, the new artistic freedom, and the evolving aesthetics have given rise to new communicative needs—needs that differ from those in the traditional gallery context. Consequently, many artists are left to spread the word about their work on their own.

Bent Petersen, 2001/tekst for the catalogue 

Reviews

Child of Art

Portrait

Sudden shifts and changes in life direction are not new for the 31-year-old gallerist Sam Jedig, who with a radical transformation of his gallery, Stalke Galleri, now introduces a new gallery concept in Denmark.

He describes his upbringing and background as chaotic, though there was also a commercial examination behind a success that, in different ways, has driven small galleries forward. A hereditary burden must also have been gained from his father, who is a skilled photo dealer, and his stepfather, who was a painter.

He matured after five years of wandering the world from the USA and Mexico to Europe and North Africa until, in 1982, he founded his first gallery in Copenhagen. That one became several. At one point, there were a few on Admiralgade until, in 1987, he had enough of polite sales and boycotts from art critics. At that time, he had already shown light by naming the American concept artists and firing off a cannon shot for the 65 artists for whom he had organized 150 exhibitions with.

With new friends at the Academy of Fine Arts, among museum people, and leading art critics, Sam Jedig began collaborating with painters and exhibition organizer Joachim Rothenborg to show American concept artists such as Anastasi and Lawrence Weiner, to gather a strong team of younger Danish avant-garde artists like Thomas Bang, Mogens Møller, Margrete Sørensen, Torben Ebbesen, Thorbjørn Lausten, and Henrik Have, as well as the fine abstract painter, Osmund Hansen, who at the time was 80 years old.

With Sam Jedig's ballast and his own dreams of being a painter, and about this being crushed in a 1983 review by Ejgil Nikolajsen here in the newspaper, there was a harsh remark about “youthful insecurity in formulation but clearly striking through.”

Now Jedig takes the artistic ambitions calmly and keeps them private while he focuses on connecting art with Denmark's artistic power struggles and grievances on hikes in the Norwegian wilderness, where he prepares for his new dignity, when in April he puts his firstborn into the world, who is not a gallery.

By Torben Weirup/Berlingske Tidende

Article:

Art's Team Denmark

Stalke Gallery on Vesterbrogade launches an exhibition concept aimed at bringing art into new surroundings — for example, a water tower. Art dealers and businesses are to pay.

Just five years ago, exhibitions preferably took place in modest basement spaces. And it was almost forbidden to earn money. That time is over. Today, it is perfectly acceptable to market art to companies and businesses. The money can be used for new art forms — a kind of "Team Denmark" for art.

Sam Jedig — owner of Stalke Gallery at Vesterbrogade 12, third floor — is launching a new and exciting project focused on art dissemination: "Stalke out of space."

An attempt to break away from traditional exhibition forms and bring art into new environments — away from the gallery. Anything is possible. An artist who works with water can exhibit in a water tower. A hotel room with all its furnishings and extra effects can become an artwork in itself — a so-called room installation. The same could take place in an abandoned shop space on Vesterbro in an attempt to create new awareness around art and the space at the same time.

"Stalke out of space" is the idealistic and experimental part of our business. At the same time, we are well aware that for it to be good and exciting, it costs money. It must earn a completely normal profit, just like our gallery or art trade, says Sam Jedig, who has never been reluctant to furnish all of Top Danmark's executive corridors with art from the Gallery — simply to earn money.

Traditionally, it is a balancing act to be a gallery owner who both wants to experiment and have bread on the table. But with "Stalke out of space," we have managed to separate things. The art trade will lay the foundation for the experiments, continues Sam Jedig, who is also an active artist.

One of the first tasks for "Stalke out of space" will be to bring Danish art abroad. A large international fair in Stockholm, Stockholm Art Fair, with approximately 30,000 visitors, will feature young artists from the "Baghuset" collective. The traditional exhibition booth will be transformed into an installation, standing in sharp contrast to the rest of the more established exhibitions. Over DKK 40,000 from Sam Jedig, Carlsberg, and SAS have been pledged to sponsor the experiments.

Art sponsorship improves a company's image, and the artists get a chance to realize their ideas with company funds, says the philosophy.

Vesterbrobladet