PRESS RELEASE

Jens Fänge and Eva Larsson

STALKE GALLERY

Opening reception Friday, April 9, 4 PM - 8 PM at Vesterbrogade 14 a.

Jens Fange has just returned from his stay in New York. Last year, he was awarded the one-year ISP scholarship (International Studio Program). This scholarship is awarded annually by IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee.

In the exhibition, Jens Fänge presents paintings, drawings (gouache), and sculptures. In his meticulously painted works, one might speak of a kind of silent sabotage of the notions and expectations associated with painting as a genre and tradition.

Jens Fänge draws from the imagery of mass culture, saga culture, and art history. His works trace various paths in their exploration of selected motifs and techniques, such as portraits, interiors, objects, and patterns, floating against backgrounds of kitschy pale pastel colors.

Humor is an undertone in Fänge's work. Among other things, he explores the playful relationship surrounding the masculine genius and a strong sense of originality by approaching the feminine genre in the form of flower painting or embroidery, steeped in tradition and familiarity.

Jens Fänge, born in 1965, is educated at the Valand Academy of Fine Arts in Gothenburg. He has exhibited in New York: PULSE: Painting Now at Rare Gallery, Under Construction at Gen Art, and From Here, Good Life Project - The BBQ Series. The following year, he participated in A Message to Pretty at Thread Waxing Space in New York, and later in From Here at High Street Project in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Eva Larsson has participated in several exhibitions in Denmark, including being featured in the exhibition Boomerang at the Nikolaj Exhibition Building in Copenhagen and at the Louisiana exhibition New Art from Denmark and Skåne.

Eva Larsson's projects are broad and always focused on inexplicable feelings and moods that influence and intertwine with our lives. Eva Larsson’s works encourage reflection and wonder about what traumas may underlie human choices and passions.

At the exhibition at Stalke Gallery, Eva Larsson presents a series of paintings and drawings with the collective title Fields of Energy, works in a project about holding on and letting go – Eva Larsson portrays the images as a kind of energy field – minute yet manic, pictures that lead thoughts toward obsession and desire.

Eva Larsson, born in 1953, is educated at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Malmö.

Reviews:

Swedish Jens Fänge, born in 1965, is not very well known in Denmark, but in New York, he has already had several exhibitions as a result of the one-year studio program awarded to him by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee.

At the exhibition in Stalke Gallery, Jens Fänge primarily presents paintings and drawings.

There are elements in Fänge's paintings that might remind one of an artist like Magritte.
Not because Fänge's pastel-colored paintings resemble Magritte’s but because he has a similarly slightly skewed view of the world. It is an almost psychedelic dizziness that Fänge creates for the viewer. At once a weightless and playful universe, and at the same time, a profound and genuine exploration of the more or less fixed codes of painting.

In contrast to Jens Fänge is the Swedish artist Eva Larsson, born in 1953, who has already been introduced in Denmark. She has participated in several exhibitions, including the large Louisiana exhibition in 1997.

Eva Larsson is primarily known as a sculptor, but at Stalke, she presents a series of paintings and drawings spun from a restless energy.

The works are part of a project about quitting smoking.

As anyone who has tried it knows, it is directly tied to a release of energy, a restless and tantalizing state where desire cannot be fulfilled simply by spinning manically within itself.

The Meticulous Brush
At Stalke in Copenhagen, Jens Fänge and Eva Larsson showcase patient works.

Eva Larsson is Swedish-born but educated in Denmark and has made her mark with significant exhibitions, including Louisiana's "New Art from Denmark and Skåne" in 1997 and "Boomerang" at Nikolaj Church in 1998. As she often does, her new works at Stalke revolve around energy and energy transfer. At Louisiana, she exhibited a large yellow energy box where one supposedly could recharge, and she focused intensely on the work. At Nikolaj, she presented a floor installation made of embroidered pillows along with a laconic note on how much energy was stored in these cross-stitches.

At Stalke, there are neither boxes nor pillows, but something as traditional as paper works and paintings on the wall. Yet, the theme is the same as before. On the canvases, Eva Larsson has marked out a small, almost military structure in patterns. A technique that immediately makes one think of arm movements and physical concentration bound into these works. The lines form moving patterns and are reminiscent of what is known as Op Art. But even more, they resemble the experiments we did in physics with iron filings, where different magnetic fields created entirely beautiful patterns. Eva Larsson's paintings are colorful and can evoke a sense of something auratic. Most beautiful are the simple paper works, which one can look at for a long time. A restless energy concentrated on whirls of small lines, spinning on their own in a logic we do not understand.

Jens Fänge, born in 1965, is a Swedish up-and-coming artist who has just completed a year-long scholarship in New York. If one were to briefly characterize his paintings, they might be described as a skewed blend of comics, Magritte, late Kandinsky, and icon painting. Against an almost monochrome background, his emblematic figures float weightlessly. A heavy, rubbery, color-saturated dizziness. Fänge paints with soft, watery colors. His preference for organic shapes and rounded forms links him with another Stalke artist, Nils Erik Gjerdevik, but Fänge is distinct in his expressivity.

The loose fragments, refined yet masculine – a scalp, a mustache, a glass, and a fragment brought together – involuntarily set off small stories, almost like a puzzle for Hercule Poirot. In vain, one tries to unravel the theme. But when Fänge is at his best, he dives into art history’s icons with a subtle, ironic approach.

Jens Fänge and Eva Larsson, Stalke Gallery, Vesterbrogade 14 A. Until May 25.

By Mai Misfeldt

Traces in a Mystery

Swedish Jens Fänge's motifs are painted with a rare thoroughness and lack of expressivity in the technique, characteristic of the late 1990s. The motif materializes lonely and posing on the canvas, resembling, with its loose character, a clue in a murder case from a previous century—or perhaps a dream that can lead to the solution. This is reinforced by a skewed and slanted arrangement, further emphasizing the labyrinthine progression of the rooms in the basement at Vesterbrogade.

Meticulously depicted, the objects are presented one after the other, seemingly free from any logic or meaning—something that makes each individual object more than a leaf, a needle, a scalp, or a shoe. The slow and deeply contemplative character of Fänge’s works contrasts with the other Swedish exhibitor: Eva Larsson. The last time her works were seen in Copenhagen was in the exhibition Come Closer last summer at the Nikolaj Exhibition Building, where she showcased a collection of embroidered cushions.

Larsson works in new pieces with small lines, almost systems, which together create a surprisingly cohesive whole. Thousands of small strokes merge to give an optical sensation of rotation, psychedelic explosions, or eternal movement. Yes, I'm Trying to Give Up Smoking is the nearly self-therapeutic backdrop for the works. Uncannily disciplined and full of energy, they demand time from the viewer, who must almost calm themselves to see them in the right light.