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Stalke Galleri, Kirke Sonnerup, invites you to the opening of the exhibitions:

Satire

William Anthony (USA)

Light and Paper

Thorbjørn Lausten

William Anthony (b. 1934) visits Denmark with the exhibition "Satire". This is Anthony's fourth exhibition in Denmark since the mid-1990s. The themes range from flaming kamikaze planes and unruly cowboys to Rococo sex and pop art. Nothing is sacred.

The New York Times describes Anthony as a "cult figure" and his works as "hysterically funny and profound."

The satirical depictions of human folly, war, mythology from the Wild West, and humorous reinterpretations of modernist masterpieces have an unmistakable, surreal charm. The iconography allows the absurd to shine through clearly, showing its pop nature. Yet it is also sharp: a punk-like awareness of how motifs are shifted and distorted.

The exhibition includes selected works created in collaboration between William Anthony and Danish artist Anne Bennike.

Thorbjørn Lausten (b.1945) presents three smaller light works with neon and a series of paper works that relate to Lausten's exploration of light art and his work on the visualization of data.

Since 1972, Thorbjørn Lausten has experimented with light as an artistic material in sculpture and installation. He has always sought to build a bridge between the natural sciences and art. An international career has taken Lausten across Europe, the USA, and Japan. Since 1987, he has regularly exhibited at Stalke Galleri.

Sam Jedig

William Anthony

Front Gallery

With light and sound

Thorbjørn Lausten makes complex, natural scientific phenomena, which are normally perceived as dry data, sensorially accessible to the public.

Interview:

By Lisbeth Bonde

Thorbjørn Lausten (b. 1945) speaks quickly and passionately about his scientifically-based art, which involves colors, light, and time. He is a respected figure, known for his works that are simultaneously complex and aesthetically refined. Olafur Eliasson lights up with a smile when Lausten is mentioned: "I particularly admire Lausten's concrete paintings from the plus-minus series," the younger colleague recently declared.

This spring, a selection of Lausten's paper works from 1972 to the present was displayed at Galerie Asbæk, and last year, two books about the artist were published. His works blink, shine, and pulse in the dark, growing in complexity and informational density since he began creating simple light installations with bare electric bulbs in the 1970s. If he had stayed at MIT in the USA, where he was invited as a research fellow in 1988-89, he would most likely be world-famous today. However, due to personal reasons, he left the United States and returned home. Since then, he has mainly worked in Germany, particularly in Karlsruhe, where he has conducted a series of artistic experiments at ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie. In 2008, the exhibition Magnet was shown at ZKM, as well as at Kunsten in Aalborg and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, which always keeps a vigilant eye on the most important and innovative trends – especially those driven by new media. Now, his works can once again be seen at Stalke Gallery in Zealand.

One of the books – two monographs – is an English-language anthology accompanying the aforementioned Magnetexhibition. Here, his works are thoroughly analyzed by various experts from different research fields. These include art historian Morten Søndergaard and the Austrian curator and author Peter Weibel, who edited the book and also included a contribution by Lausten himself, along with contributions from semioticians Michael May and Frederik Stjernfelt, philosopher Hartmut Böhme, and media scholar Peter Lunenfeld. It is distinctly a book for the deeply interested, aiming to explore Lausten’s work on a serious, scientific basis.

In contrast, the book Thorbjørn Lausten: Review from Forlaget Politisk Revy offers an overview. It includes an introductory piece by art historian Anne Ring Petersen, who highlights Lausten as an artist operating between categories. "Even though he is receptive to impulses from the movements that define the era’s aesthetic agenda, he has always maintained his artistic integrity," she writes. Lausten is – and the book's lavish design also attests to this – an artist to be admired.

DERES reporter meets the artist on Falster at his studio, located in a former carpenter's workshop that he has beautifully modernized with sufficient space for, among other things, film screenings.

– In general, you’ve been focused on visualizing scientific data in installations, transforming them into a comprehensible and artistically appealing language. Why did you choose this field of work?

"I’ve always been interested in technology and kinetics – that is, motion – and in this context, I was drawn into exploring the natural sciences and the laws of nature. Fundamentally, the 20th century is characterized by science and technology. It’s unavoidable. It all began around 1900 when Max Planck introduced quantum theory. I quickly realized that art is closely linked to society and science and became inspired by the Russian Constructivists – Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, the Gabo brothers, and the Italian Futurists – who combined science and art early on.

It might sound strange, but nature itself is actually a construction. One might think that there are pre-existing truths, but recognition and understanding continuously evolve with technological and scientific development. Art has a long tradition of studying and exploring nature, going all the way back to the Greeks. The Renaissance builds on this – think of Leonardo da Vinci – but from Romanticism onward, there’s been a split between art and science. Since then, art has often viewed science as cold and not very humanistic. In response, I attempt to open up awareness of science. I believe art should not ignore fundamental knowledge, such as mass-energy equivalence – to use Einstein as an example. I’ve delved into this field of natural science, aware that knowledge also builds on construction. Objective truth doesn’t really exist, even though we should continually strive for scientific objectivity as an uncompromising standard in our work."

– But what is it, then, that connects art and natural science today?

"Science and art share human imagination. This is fundamental, and we cannot detach humanity from its imaginative abilities – both scientific and artistic."

– As technology advances, won’t we also better understand our surroundings?

"Yes, new knowledge is constantly being added, and sometimes we must adjust our theories – after all, we cannot explain black holes, even though they can be observed. In this context, I would like to mention the concept of instrumental cognition, where we use technology to extend our senses. Instruments make it possible to perceive phenomena that our senses alone cannot, such as atomic structures or gamma rays. Here, we must use instruments. I try to create models for visualizing invisible physical phenomena – for example, by using false colors."

– Can you explain what that is?

"Science uses false colors, for instance, when scanning a brain to visualize a tumor, which is assigned the color green. But we don’t have green colors in our bodies. The false colors carry symbolic value based on specific conditions. They are also used in weather maps, for instance, to show how temperature is distributed on the globe. If we are to understand large datasets, we need to assign them colors. In my works, I transform data into colors."

The multimedia installation Sun, exhibited at Esbjerg Art Museum in 2005, is an immersive installation that one can walk into. It is filled with pulsating light patterns accompanied by a cello. It incorporates four different types of data: solar winds, the distribution of sunspots, the sun’s total radiation, and the sun’s average magnetic field. "These four sets of data are interrelated to show complex interaction patterns. Since these interactions unfold over time, it is media that can best transform them – also time-based media – and I have used both sound and dynamic imagery. With this work, I aimed to make complex phenomena, which might otherwise be experienced as dry data, sensorially accessible. The project was developed in collaboration with scientists Florian Grond, Jesper Munk Jensen, and composer Frank Halbig," Lausten explains.

Simultaneously with such complex installations, Lausten also works with more traditional media such as graphics and painting, particularly the aforementioned plus-minus series, which aligns with the tradition of concrete art from the 1960s. Even these paintings are created using a specific method or system – in a way comparable to the systematic poetry of the same decade – containing both beauty and variety. To execute them, Lausten uses an aleatory method – a method of chance. He rolls a die and reduces its six possible outcomes to two, thereby creating a binary system – plus and minus. He then chooses six colors – three plus and three minus. These paintings demonstrate how data can be communicated, for example, in informational contexts. But that’s another story, for at the same time, plus refers to the positive and minus to the negative, which as opposites give life its perpetual dynamism.

Magnet – Thorbjørn Lausten/Visual Systems. Kehrer Verlag, 160 pages, richly illustrated with contributions from many authors.
Thorbjørn Lausten: Review, with texts by Anne Ring Petersen, Thorbjørn Lausten, Niels Egebak, and Klaus Peter Dencker, 320 pages, richly illustrated, published by Forlaget Politisk Revy.
Stalke Gallery, Englerupvej 62, 4060 Kirke Saaby, is exhibiting works by Thorbjørn Lausten until November 21.

Thorbjørn Lausten

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