PRESS RELEASE

New paintings by

• Hans Peterson
• Jonas Hvid Søndergaard
  

Stalke Galleri is pleased to open its doors to an exhibition featuring new paintings by Hans Peterson and, in the Project Room, Jonas Hvid Søndergaard.

Hans Peterson showcases five large, square paintings that explore themes of identity and worldview. Peterson examines identification by blending figurative and abstract elements. Placed around the canvases, we recognize a house or a human figure, while other areas remain undefined, colorful forms. Recognizable objects are borrowed from other sources, such as winged Amazons from kitschy comic books, where Peterson shifts the context and thereby disrupts identity.

Thus, Peterson investigates our perception of identity, questioning the reliability of what we see. He draws inspiration from Gothic tales by Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock Holmes to the adventurous narratives of comic books and fairy tales. These fascinating universes are evident in Peterson’s exploration of how recognition and identity are created. By placing these figures in new contexts, in a reversed order, he challenges the perception of their original identity. Peterson uses character stereotypes to explore identity, pushing it from its self-assuredness, breaking it down into a constructed and fragile universe.

In the Project Room

Jonas Hvid Søndergaard presents new paintings created specifically for the Project Room. He works with photographs of interiors and exteriors, creating digital sketches based on these photographs, which are overlapped and fragmented until the result is an almost abstract landscape. Trees, stairs, windows, and tiles are used as nearly graphic elements in a space where form, surface, space, and color play together. A recognizable reality is hinted at, while the loose fragments reveal their own abstract life.

Hvid delves into techniques that animate the creation of the paintings, showing this process in a new film. In the film, he introduces the architecture of the Project Room, which he calls "the living image," and illustrates how it would be if the surfaces in the paintings could move freely. Where the paintings work as an abstraction of two figurative elements, the film reverses this, showing the figurations of the paintings’ abstraction. With animation effects, the focus shifts to what is "beside" the frame, and what normally resides outside the canvas but never becomes paint.

The exhibition runs until February 14.