The Modern will be extended until November 15
Make an appointment at any time or come by Sundays between 1 & 6 p.m
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The Modern
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a group show with:
JEFFREY TRANCHELL
JACOB GRØNBECH JENSEN
KYLE KNODELL
SUSANNE PERSSON
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”Art has shown that it is a question of determining the relations. It has revealed that the forms exists only for the creation of relationships; that forms create relation and that relations create forms. In this duality of forms and their relations neither takes precedence.” – Piet Mondrian, “Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art (Figurative Art and Nonfigurative Art)”
”These visions call themselves new planes, because of their meeting in a new unknown (the plane of non-agreement). [---] it will pass from its false absolute, through a series of relative values, in to a new absolute value, true and poetic.” – Max Ernst, “What is the mechanism of Collage”
”Reason has robbed man of his roots. He leads a tragic life.” – Jean Arp, “Abstract Art, Concrete Art”
The Modern
Ever since it emerged in Europe between the two world wars, artists have sought to relate to modernism and it's different expressions. For this exhibition Public Surface is proud to present a group of artists that unite in an exploration of modernist traditions.
Having in common the usage of montage or assemblage and a play with surface and the plane of field, the show includes work that in different ways work with plasticity and the extension of visual limits.
All artists work with various collage techniques, creating new meanings through a poetic language built by remnants from the everyday.
Jeffrey Tranchell's collages consists of magazine pages that are "price marked" with tags like the ones to be found on fruits in the grocery stores in the US. The popular theme in the three pieces, the usage of the fashion industry and the enhancing of that industry's commercial tone, got a pop art quality, but Tranchell is above all engaged in a play with surface and dimensions. By sticking price tags on the prints Tranchell focus on the pure form of the two elements. The rectangle forms in bright solid colors break down the illusion of depth in the photograph that makes up the ad, and stubbornly points to the two-dimensional surface.
Similarly, Susanne Persson's untitled print shows us a photograph, taken from a website where people post machines for sale, with a part of the photograph blocked out. A white rectangle, stretched across the surface negates the image. While breaking down the illusive elements that constitutes photography, it simultaneously creates new ones.
In his digital collages, Kyle Knodell creates optical illusions simply by pasting one photograph on top of another. Like the abstract expressionists he acknowledges and challenges the eyes physical procedure. The three-dimensional scenes in the photographs of building materials scattered in different rooms are in the process of viewing transformed into two-dimensional blocks of color.
In this remix of modernism the artists sample and play with artistic leftovers. Weaving together disparate ideas they create collages not only in a physical sense but also intellectually. Whereas the modernist period gave us clear definitions and opposed tendencies, they are here merged together. In the modernist tradition the figurative and non-figurative where held separate as two different ways to approach and view the world. Since then this separation has been dissolved. Now, everything is transformed into the same thing.
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