PRESS RELEASE

Michael Williams - Fried Paint

Kaspar Bonnén - Invisible graffiti and other photographic works in progress

5 December 2008 – 24 January 2009

It is a great pleasure to be able to present an exhibition by the American artist Michael Williams (*1978), Fried Paint. This is the first time that Williams has exhibited his paintings in Denmark. Imagine post-impressionism far into the future and high on consciousness-expanding drugs! That's what Michael Williams' works look like. Williams' paintings are pointillist; he utilises psychedelic colours and distorted perspectives, and his designs are imaginative, often almost surreal. The result is a kind of magic realism, with a far-out happy and weird ambience.

It can probably best be described by the artist's friend Joe Bradley, who has sent us a letter, part of which we quote here:

Dear Copenhagen,
Behold! "Fried Paint", the third-ever solo exhibition by Great American Painter Michael Williams! It's hard to tell if this shit will fly over there. (I'm sitting in a cold room in Brooklyn.) Never been to Copenhagen. Never will. Michael's work will. You will see it. You will see a middle-aged snorkeller in a chance encounter with a beautiful buxom fish. You will see a lobster surf the internet with his buddy the clam. You may even see a turbaned dude yacking into a telephone wired to the side of a camel.

Who knows? I think it will fly. It will fly. I have a funny feeling.

Like all great art, Williams' painting trumps language every time. So ladies and gentlemen, dig in and enjoy! "Fried Paint"!

Cheers, Joe Bradley
Brooklyn, NY 11/25/08

Michael Williams has exhibited his paintings and done performances in various places in the USA, including MoMA, New York, PS1, New York, Deitch Projects, New York and Triple Base Gallery, San Francisco. He is affiliated with the CANADA gallery in New York.

In the project room, we also have the great pleasure of presenting an exhibition by Kaspar Bonnén, whose new photo series can now be viewed for the first time in Denmark. All of the photographs, as the title Invisible graffiti and other photographic works in progress implies, are works that are developed over time.

In the work "Jeg troede, jeg havde mistet dig, men sandheden er, at jeg aldrig har haft dig" ("I thought I had lost you, but the truth is, I never had you") from 2007, a large wooden sculpture is transformed into text. We watch the wooden sculpture slowly being broken down, and a text and a new work emerging from the individual fragments. As is often the case, Bonnén's works are about construction – which encompasses purely physical creation, but also, and to an equal extent, identity formation.

The photographic works are closely related to Kaspar Bonnén's other production of paintings, sculptures, texts and ceramics. We find ourselves close to Kaspar: his ideas, his home, his own private stream of consciousness – as can be seen from the title of one of his paintings: "The-Museum-of-I", or in the sculptures/piles of bits and pieces that he exhibited in boxes at the JF Willumsen Museum in Frederikssund in 2007.

Kaspar Bonnén is one of Denmark's most broadly-based artists, and in 2010 he will be holding a major exhibition at the gallery Kunsthallen Brandts in Odense, where visitors will be able to experience a wide selection of his fine works.

We hope moreover to be able to present an entirely new catalogue of Bonnén's works at the exhibition opening. The book is now on the way, and will hopefully be finished by the date of the private viewing, 5 December.

More information about the two exhibitions may be obtained by contacting the gallery at tel. +45 32545206, or by e-mail to: gcw@christinawilson.net.