PRESS RELEASE

Fie Norsker - Mosaic
Ulrik Weck - Untitled

24 October – 29 November 2008

It is with great pleasure that Galleri Christina Wilson presents its first exhibition of new paintings by the Danish artist Fie Norsker (b. 1974). In the exhibition Mosaic, Norsker juxtaposes fragments from different universes and gathers them together to form a world inhabited by totem poles, penises, witches, bats and owls.

As always, Norsker's work is full of energy and humour, and unorthodox in its choice of both motifs and colours. In the work Dansesko (Dancing Shoes), an enormous owl wearing tiny, delicate dancing shoes takes up most of the canvas. The work is presented in shades of white, yellow, purple and brown. In Willy in the Woods, a penis is portrayed in purple and brown colours which fill most of the large canvas. This masculine motif is painted in an attractive and seductive manner. The colours shimmer delicately and Norsker creates the mosaics in the painting by scraping the still-wet paint to one side. Beautiful mosaics in wondrous colours thereby arise in her baroque and daring portrayal of the masculine genitalia, and we are witness to the deconstruction of the penis as a powerful phallic symbol. In this way, Fie Norsker challenges both the phallus as motif, and painting itself, as the bearer of traditional masculine qualities.

Like the early Christian mosaics in Byzantium and Italy, the motifs of Norsker's works are not naturalistic; they are stylised, portrayed from the front, and full of symbolism. But in contrast to the Christian tradition, they have no fixed iconography. The owl, for example, is often seen as a symbol of insight, wisdom and even foresight, but it can also be viewed as a creature which shuns the light and only awakens in the darkness, and which thus stands for night, sleep and death. In western tradition, the bat usually personifies the night, but in China it symbolises joy and a long life, and is synonymous with happiness.

In Norsker's works, the significance of the individual figures is never spelled out, and the individual elements in the paintings often serve more than one function. In Totem Treasure, the eyes of the totem figure are represented by a semicircular shape which could also be regarded as a portrait of a landscape with a setting sun. In other works, the same semicircular shapes form caves or holes in the landscape, while in yet others they form a part of a figure's aura. This interchange of motifs and elements makes Norsker's works instantly recognisable, thanks to her quite firmly established vocabulary. Fie Norsker's paintings are simultaneously captivating, amusing and highly unusual in their use of phallic symbols, witches, owls and bats.

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Council.


It is also a great pleasure to be able to exhibit new works by Ulrik Weck. For the exhibition Untitled, Ulrik Weck has created a number of text-based works and a series of sculptural installations which imitate bookcases.

The books for these bookcases are made of found pieces of wood; sometimes painted or raw, and at other times carefully bound in paper. Although the books cannot be read, one cannot resist investigating them and even becoming absorbed by their differences. Old pieces of wood can most certainly also tell a good story. The "reader" is inspired to "read" them in a way which is different from that normally dictated by books. At the same time, however, we cannot ignore the fact that it is impossible to gain access to their imaginary literary contents – in that respect, the books never reveal their secrets.

At the end of the 1960s, a change took place in the art world which made it acceptable to create art which focused less on the artistic object in itself than on the process of its creation, and to investigate the rules and functions through which art comes into being in the first place. This change was regarded by many as a definitive break with the object-centred art of the past. In his text-based works, Weck tests the radicality of this break by giving them a second or third tour around the art historical circuit.

In his works, Weck usually plays with ambiguities and humour, together with the inherent displacements that this creates room for. In his book Le rire (published for the first time in 1900), the French philosopher Henri Bergson provides a definition of laughter as both law and anti-law; he describes how in a society defined by laws and regulations, there is an ever-present danger that citizens may adhere too closely to the rules and thereby become rigid, obstinate, inflexible and disharmonious. But as society can hardly make a law forbidding conformity with the law, says Bergson, laughter can be used instead as a penalty for excessive stubbornness. It is a highly effective punishment – as anyone who has ever been ridiculed will acknowledge. Humour is therefore not always a laughing matter, but can be an extremely serious way of undermining dominant structures and regulations. It is these dominant structures in the world of art that Weck plays with, and in relation to which he simultaneously positions himself as both insider and outsider in order to be able to comment on them and create friction and displacements between them.


Private viewing: 24 October, 5.00 pm. The opening hours will subsequently be Tuesday-Friday 12.00 pm - 5.00 pm, Saturdays 12.00 pm - 3.00 pm. More information on the two exhibitions is available at the gallery or by enquiry to: gcw@christinawilson.net. The exhibition can be seen until 29 November.


There will also be an artist talk with Fie Norsker on Saturday 25 October at 1.00 pm.