Coming Up

Coming up

Stalke had invited 11 young Danish artists, who had or previously had a collaboration with the gallery, to participate in the selection of 11 other younger artists.

The “strict conditions” set by Stalke were that each representative could choose only one artist, whom they believed had an interesting project or concept in their artistic practice. The exhibition was intended to create an opportunity to present a broader range of young art, and no thematic cohesion was deliberately sought.

The exhibition was conceived as a snapshot of what was happening on the younger art scene in the 1990s, rather than as an attempt to define a “Top 10” list of a “new” generation.

For Stalke, it was important to involve the “older” generation of the 1990s in drawing attention to this specific generation, which had been of great interest to the gallery over several years.

The exhibiting artists were:

Claus Andersen – Anne Mette Arendt – Niels Bonde – Ulrik Heltoft – Simone Aaberg Kærn – Nikolaj Recke – Tal R – Tommy Støckel – Annika Ström – Klaus Thejll – Lena Ignestam

The artists responsible for the “selection” were:

Olafur Eliasson – Nils Erik Gjerdevik – Peter Holst Henckel – Frans Jacobi – Lars Mathisen – Peter Neuchs – Lars Bent Petersen – Hans Petterson – Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen – Peter Rössell – Joachim Koester

Coming Up was a group exhibition in which Stalke invited eleven young Danish artists with an existing or previous connection to the gallery to each nominate one artist from an even younger generation. Conceived as an open framework without thematic guidance, the exhibition functioned as a snapshot of the emerging art scene of the mid-1990s rather than an attempt to define a new canon.

In Politiken, Karsten R. S. Iversen described the exhibition as a challenge to fixed hierarchies, pointing to the energy that arises in the encounter between the established and the still unresolved:

“The newest of the new, where communication and ideas are more essential than craftsmanship.”

Several works were highlighted for their immediacy and their resistance to finished form. According to Iversen, the exhibition unfolded in a field where artists advanced through repetition, minimal means, and deliberate breaks with expectation.

Malene La Cour Rasmussen placed the exhibition within a broader context, describing it as part of a marked development among very young artists in Copenhagen. She emphasized an artistic practice in which the personal, the fragile, and the experimental took precedence:

“A generation that works with uncertainty as a driving force rather than as a problem.”

Taken together, Coming Up was read as an exhibition that pointed forward without fixing direction — a temporary constellation of positions that collectively outlined the contours of a new artistic awareness.

Back to Stalke Galleri exhibition archive