PRESS RELEASE

Kaj Nyborg

+
Cecilia Westerberg

(Project Room)

Stalke Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition featuring Kaj Nyborg and, in the Project Room, Cecilia Westerberg.

Kaj Nyborg presents the exhibition dean martin delirium +, consisting of installation objects and photographs that critically examine social constructs and their states.

dean martin delirium + takes its title from the actor, entertainer, and singer Dean Martin, who in this exhibition functions only as a medium through which the artist explores societal concepts of space and room.

From childhood, Nyborg remembers Dean Martin’s figure from his TV show, which first aired in Denmark in the 1970s. Martin performed in a setting that mimicked la dolce vita in middle-class homes, with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Dean Martin’s TV persona embodied an image of a man who was both carefree and self-destructive at the same time. He represented nostalgia and the collapse of the middle class: the familiar and secure as well as the destruction and distortion of these notions.

Nyborg’s work references Dean Martin as an image of the familiar drawn from reality but, at the same time, no longer entirely real. His works take recognizable objects from our daily lives, such as a dollhouse or curtains, and reshape them to alter their appearance and function, challenging their familiarity and unsettling the viewer. Nyborg works with aluminum — an industrial and clinical material — which distances itself from the everyday while maintaining its utility. Strategically and conceptually, Nyborg manipulates the familiar, transforming the ordinary into something strange and disconcerting, offering a perspective on global delirium.

In the Project Room, Cecilia Westerberg presents the exhibition Night Swarms with animation works and drawings. In these animations, a night swarm and a summer bird appear, exploring themes of dreams and magic that emerge while we sleep or daydream. The imagery of the night swarm and the summer bird creates a metaphor for the longing for freedom and imagination. Westerberg’s works elevate the dream world into an intense, vibrant dimension, transforming everyday life into a state of wonder and play. Her animations are inspired by Disney classics such as Fantasia, where magic dissolves time and creates fantastic, poetic imagery.

Kaj Nyborg’s aluminum works were completed at the State Workshops for Art and Craft.
Cecilia Westerberg’s exhibition is supported by the Art Fund.

Kaj Nyborg

Cecilia Westerberg