PRESS RELEASE

ALBERT MERTZ

“FROM A LONG LIFE IN THE SERVICE OF ART”

Opening reception on February 23, 5–8 pm

From February 23 to April 6, 2001, Stalke Gallery will present an Albert Mertz exhibition featuring works from Lone Mertz's collection. The exhibition includes paintings and collages/drawings from the early 1950s to 1990, many of which have not been shown previously. The selection was curated by Lone Mertz, Søren Andreasen, and Jes Brinch.

This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see a comprehensive presentation of Albert Mertz’s work. The curators have emphasized the diverse nature of Albert Mertz’s artistic practice. One might characterize Mertz as an "artistic problem-solver" who found inspiration in discussions about the production and function of art—whether related to specific forms of artistic expression or the broader cultural context of productivity. Albert Mertz was constantly preoccupied with the conditions of art, and by examining selected works from his practice, one can experience a spectrum from the sublime to the banal.

The exhibition is primarily structured around series of works, showcasing how individual pieces contribute to the ongoing interplay of form, systematics, and symbolism that define Albert Mertz's artistic practice. These works entertain, provoke, meditate, and perplex, and as Albert Mertz wrote in his diary in 1983: "A work of art must be seen... in a context with the surrounding culture, as a medium and not as a goal."

The exhibition, which runs until April 6, will be installed by Søren Andreasen.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a catalog featuring text by Jes Brinch will be published.

Reviews:

Popular Conceptual Art
A brilliant exhibition at Stalke Gallery highlights the controversial Albert Mertz.

Red and blue pictures. That’s what many associate with Albert Mertz—if they know him. Mertz isn’t as well-known among the general public as one might think. He’s been called "an artist’s artist." And, one might add, an art connoisseur’s artist. But Mertz was also a popular artist. And an intellectual artist. He was an artist who sought new paths, openings, and connections. An artist who bridged the gap between high and mass culture, between the complex and the accessible. In many ways, he is an outstanding figure in Danish art history.

At Stalke Gallery on Vesterbrogade in Copenhagen, an exhibition of Albert Mertz’s work has just opened. It includes paintings, drawings, and collages spanning from the early 1950s to 1990, the year of his death. Just as one approaches the red and blue pictures, Mertz’s composition dominates. Angular contrasts, curious juxtapositions, and a mix of abstract and figurative emblems and pictograms emerge. There is a persistent interplay between illusion and flatness, or between detail and emptiness. Some of the pictures are a bit sloppily executed, but they still manage to charm their way into a serious conversation.

The exhibition also includes earlier works not previously exhibited. Drawings and collages from the 1950s show Mertz’s early explorations, sharp senses, and experimental language in relation to modern art. His famous “Farewell to Red” takes center stage and flips the entire concept on its head, returning to the red-blue imagery, which simultaneously critiques and embraces stereotypical notions of a good life—partly overpainted in red or blue.

Albert Mertz (1920–90) was one of Denmark’s first conceptual artists. Together with Jørgen Roos, he created Denmark’s first experimental film, The Flight, in 1942, and 20 years later, he was co-editor of the legendary Fluxus concert in Nikolaj Church. In the intervening years, he co-founded Linien II in 1947, a group of concrete-abstract artists that stirred controversy with discussions of art for art’s sake.

Albert Mertz was, among other things, a multi-artist. He was also a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he was admitted at the age of 16—two years after his first exhibition. The works in the exhibition at Stalke Gallery, titled Works from a Long Life in the Service of Art, were selected from Lone Mertz’s collection and curated in collaboration with artists Søren Andreasen and Jes Brinch. Andreasen managed the excellent arrangement of the exhibition, while Brinch authored the text in the small, fine catalog published in connection with the exhibition.

Jes Brinch was a student of Albert Mertz in the final years of Mertz’s career, and the text is both a deeply personal and honest tribute to Mertz as a teacher, as well as an insightful introduction to Mertz’s views on art and its role in society, described through his teaching methods.

“What fascinated me about his work was its richness, the sheer variation. There was an abundance of ideas—not all equally good, of course, but often with immense humor,” Brinch writes about Mertz, continuing: “Albert Mertz proved to be an outstanding teacher, the best I’ve ever had, and the only one who could provide theoretical instruction rooted in his own experiences and opinions.”

The conversation, as understood from the text, was one of the core elements in Albert Mertz’s teaching. He tirelessly questioned the purpose of art and emphasized the artist’s responsibility to society. “One must never give up on doubt,” Mertz claimed. However, after viewing the exhibition, there is no doubt about Mertz’s genius or his significance in Danish art history.

Kristine Kern

Politiken 13.3.2001

Kristine KernStalke Gallery, Vesterbrogade 14A, Copenhagen.
Wednesday–Friday: 1–5:30 pm, Saturday: 11–3 pm. Open until April 6.

Art Full of Energy

At Stalke Gallery, you can currently see an eye-opening exhibition by the Danish artist Albert Mertz, organized by younger artists.

We could start here. With a picture from 1964. It is gray. Completely gray. On the gray picture is a gray package. The picture is titled “What’s in the Package.” The package is Albert Mertz, the Danish artist who passed away in 1990. The exhibition, “From a Long Life in the Service of Art,” opens the package and unfolds in all its colors, especially the red and blue, and the crumpled ideas that Mertz enriched Danish art with.

“I do not confuse art with reality or reality with art. I try to figure out what is art, what is reality, and what relationships (or lack of relationships) there can be between the two,” the artist wrote in 1974. It is precisely this relationship between art and reality that is the central theme and eternal subject of inquiry for Mertz.

Albert Mertz is one of those artists whose work takes time to understand. At first, he was ahead of his time, producing works that many younger artists, now working in the borderland between art and reality, seem to have finally placed in a comprehensible context.

In the spring of 1999, four major Mertz exhibitions were held at national museums, accompanied by a comprehensive catalog that provided deep insights into his work, where the red and blue colors could immediately be simplified but, in reality, spanned a much broader range. While the 1999 exhibitions were curated by museum professionals, this exhibition at Stalke Gallery represents the artist’s perspective on Mertz.

It is the artists Jes Brinch and Søren Andreasen who, in collaboration with Lone Mertz, have chosen to focus on the material left behind after Mertz’s death. Paintings, collages, and drawings spanning from the early 1950s to 1990 are displayed, not chronologically but with a focus on Mertz’s method of working in series across time.

It is an exhibition full of energy, showing that Mertz could define his own art history, think ahead, but also constantly question what art is and should be in modern society. A recurring motif, or symbol if you like, is the square. The mathematically defined frame, which, in different ways, has shaped all of Western art history’s thinking about art. The image, the flag, the window to the world, and later, the TV screen.

An empty field that is the artist’s task to process. It goes everywhere. What does the artist work on down to the millimeter?

Mertz played with different ways of painting frames on paper or painted his red-and-blue fields with oil on canvas.

The exhibition shows how much Mertz was in tune with the international avant-garde. From early training at the academy, where he, at 16 years old, became the youngest student since Thorvaldsen, he quickly earned the nickname "The Little Raphael," until he, in the late sixties, began working with the readymade concept and modestly painted materials. The crumpled Mertz, who thinks with pencils or brushes and scribbles strange things down. Houses, boxes, squares. Words. The word-playing Mertz, who takes a French advertisement for central heating and paints it in warm red and cold blue. Mertz finds the most ordinary pictures, the ones we see all the time but never consider as images; unsettling images, and transforms them with his red and blue accents. Mertz, who apparently cannot see a piece of tape without including his red-blue stripes.

The red and blue colors came early; in the 1970s, they became a kind of concept for Mertz and a way to defend working with material, sensual elements while still questioning the entire concept of art. Mertz is not non-serious; his humor thrives only against a background of deep seriousness. As someone who consistently and faithfully believes in art as recognition paired with an awareness that art is also a game and show. There is this split between great visual talent and an almost lustful desire to paint, and the awareness that art is also a social construction filled with bourgeois, restrictive conventions that one, as an old socialist, must necessarily turn against. This keeps Mertz’s art open and welcoming.

"Sats" – it says on one of the pictures. "See" – it says on another. Wake up. Participate in your present, take part in your contemporary imagery, use your own eyes and do not just let the images challenge you, but always ask yourself what they mean to you. This emanates from all the walls. And it is this doubt, this challenge, that characterizes the exhibition and Mertz’s work in general. No self-assured power play is strong enough to deny that it can and must be placed in the fruitful field of doubt.

It was not easy for Mertz himself to navigate this field of doubt, no doubt about that, but it is a gift for us others and a testament to an artist who still dares to exhibit his own doubt.

The exhibition includes a small catalog with text, or rather a personal essay by Jes Brinch; a tribute from a former student to the great art educator that Mertz proved to be through his time as a teacher and later as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts.

But go see the fine exhibition for yourself. And go and look behind it, out into the world of cultural images – with different eyes.

Stalke Gallery, Vesterbrogade 14 A, Copenhagen.
Wednesday–Friday 1–5:30 pm, Saturday 11 am–3 pm. Until April 6.

By Mai Misfeldt

Red and Then Blue

By Pernille Anker Kristensen

"From a Long Life in Service to Art"
Albert Mertz

The framer has been busy at Stalke Galleri on Vesterbro in Copenhagen. For the fascinating exhibition about Albert Mertz builds on newly framed collages, drawings, and paintings from 1950 to 1990. The exhibition is an opportunity to dive into Mertz's spectacular work, which oscillates between the sublime and the casual.

Here is a painting of ferry companies, exaggerated advertisements, measuring booklets, linoleum prints, and a series of car crosses that invade the covers of a car magazine from 1976.

The abundance of ideas comes together in humor and unfolds in blue and red Mertz-land of bulging canvases and scrappy cardboard boxes.

A cavalcade of red-blue masterpieces immediately catches the visitor's eye in the first room. Meanwhile, one must head further back to find the entertaining advertisements, which have received an extra coat of paint and are now set up as old-fashioned salon art.

Several works are shown for the first time at Stalke Galleri, and the exhibition is arranged by Lone Mertz, Søren Andreasen, and Jes Brinch. In the small catalog, Jes Brinch portrays an entertaining portrait of Albert Mertz as a teacher at the Art Academy, who taught the value of art on the one hand and gave it a well-placed kick out the door on the other.

Caption:

Albert Mertz: Woman in an Advertisement for Nescafé.

By Pernille Anker Kristensen

Watch Out - Mertz!

In recent years, there has fortunately been a growing interest in the Danish artist and pioneer Albert Mertz. Most recently, we saw an excellent exhibition at Galleri Asbæk, where the Irish-born conceptual artist Les Levine showed that there is also great international interest in Mertz.

Stalke Galleri, well-hidden in Vesterbro but nonetheless always worth a visit, has always had an eye for Mertz. Therefore, it was a natural idea when two of the gallery’s artists, Søren Andreasen and Jes Brinch, suggested putting together a Mertz exhibition for the venue. The exhibition features paintings, collages, and drawings from the early 1950s up to the artist’s death in 1990.

Mertz debuted at the age of just 16 at KE in 1936 and was admitted to the Art Academy that same year. He later transitioned into a conceptual understanding of art: that art is more about ideas than just aesthetics. As he saw it, art had to adapt if it was to have any relevance in this visually oriented time. He worked with clear signal values, which was one of the reasons he primarily chose to work with red and blue, a combination that almost became his trademark.

Caption:
Albert Mertz’s “Don’t Fall into the Water” from 1981.