Gennemstrejf / Wandering
Per Bak Jensen
Stalke Galleri
Vesterbrogade 14A
The photographer and visual artist Per Bak Jensen presented the exhibition Gennemstrejf) Wandering at Stalke Galleri from September 19 to October 16.
The exhibition consisted of 30 photographs divided into two rooms. In the first room, nine large color photographs (90 × 116 cm) were displayed, depicting various locations in Denmark, England, France, Italy, and the USA. Accompanying these images were nine small black-and-white photographs (30 × 30 cm), forming a series of close-ups from a gravel road in New Zealand.
In the second room, a series of color photographs featuring ivy and a number of still-life compositions of wilted flowers, feathers, bark, and mushrooms were shown. These images represented Per Bak Jensen’s perspective on the world. As in the artist’s earlier exhibitions, the works at first glance appeared as seemingly mundane images of a recognizable world. Upon closer inspection, however, they revealed an underlying, insistent pattern—life and its transience—that reached out to the viewer.
What stood out most in these images, as in life itself, was their tone, which touched the viewer and suggested the possibility of change. As an attempt to outline an entry point to the exhibition, the artist summarized his motivations and position in the following short manifesto:
Wandering
“Over time, my mind in solitude developed an ability to detach itself from its anchoring in reason. In order not to lose my connection to the world, I pursued this mindset and briefly mapped, through my images, the areas that were passed through.”
— Per Bak Jensen, 1998
Per Bak Jensen, who was a lecturer in photography at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, had an extensive exhibition history and was represented in several museums both in Denmark and abroad.
In connection with the exhibition, a catalogue was published and could be obtained by contacting the gallery.
Installation views from Per Bak Jensen’s exhibition at Stalke Galleri, 1998.
Catalogue cover for Gennemstrejf / Wandering, Per Bak Jensen.
The exhibition catalogue includes a text by Bent Fausing.
In her reviews, Lisbeth Bonde describes Per Bak Jensen’s photography as operating at the intersection of perception, reflection, and recognition. She emphasizes how the images, at first encounter, may appear as quiet observations of landscapes, objects, and fragments of nature, yet gradually unfold into more complex layers of meaning. According to Bonde, the photographs possess a meditative quality that slows the viewer’s gaze and invites sustained attention.
Bonde highlights how Jensen’s visual universe revolves around transience and the traces of time, both in nature and at the margins of civilization. Motifs such as road constructions, scaffolding, plants, and still lifes do not function merely as documentation, but take on a symbolic, almost ritual character. The photographs are described as marked by a distinctive balance between the concrete and the metaphysical, where life and decay coexist.
In her discussion of the rose still life, Bonde notes that the image can be read both as a classical aesthetic composition and as a clear reminder of nature’s cycles and inevitable dissolution. Here, beauty is inseparable from death, lending the image a quiet yet insistent intensity.
Overall, Bonde presents Per Bak Jensen’s photographs as works that do not seek the spectacular, but instead insist on presence, attentiveness, and a slow, deliberate reading of the world.