Nanna Abell, Morten Buch, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Richard Deacon, Andreas Eriksson, Pernille With Madsen
EXPANSE: Galleri Susanne Ottesen x DesignByThem
18 – 20 Jun 2025
EXPANSE
DesignByThem x Galleri Susanne Ottesen
19 – 20 June 2025
For 3daysofdesign, Galleri Susanne Ottesen hosts Australian design studio DesignByThem, presenting an interdisciplinary collaborative exhibition. Exploring form, materiality, and visual languages, the studio’s designware and selected artworks by gallery artists enter into intimate dialogues throughout the space.
There is an immediate kinship in this meeting of art and design – a shared sensitivity to surface, weight, and structure that is explored at human-scale. The featured artworks and furniture each offer a distinct approach to materiality, while a pervasive domesticity shapes the space. These are furnishings meant for sitting, lying, eating on and their arrival in the gallery transforms the space, creating inhabitable rooms.
Amid this interplay – of homely domesticity and voluminous white-walled gallery – selected artworks emerge, whether behind a dining table, above a sofa, or cutting a window into a wall. Like softened furniture shaped by a body that once rested there, Nanna Abell’s sculptures operate in the tension between use and residue. Net- and grid-forms recur through her practice – often sandblasted and powder-coated in stylised hues – hovering somewhere between ornament and infrastructure. There’s a sensuality to these works, in the worn shine or small imprint on the surface.
Elsewhere, Olav Christopher Jenssen’s ceramic sculptures introduce mass and colour. These sculptures proudly display the unmistakable marks and gestures of making: strata of accumulating clay, compacted mounds shaped by hand, scrapes and indentations, all emphasising the creation process, with their shiny glazed surfaces celebrating this processual state.
In Morten Buch’s abstract paintings, domestic and design-like forms flicker in and out – a lonely shoe, a tilting vase, a tent glimpsed just as it begins to disappear.Objects become gestures, and gestures become objects in a cycle of recognition and abstraction.
Richard Deacon contributes with precise pastel-hued ceramics which seem to float just above the surface they rest on, gently tilting side to side. Their richly textured glazed surfaces look teasingly like the crispy outer coating of candy, their apparent edible quality furthered by their pill-like form. His framed textile prints navigate the space between digital imagery and tactile materiality.
Pernille With Madsen’s photographic works destabilise architectural spaces – bending visual logic to create impossible perspectives. The resulting views become layered, unstable, and performative lenses, examining the areas we inhabit and blindly move through. This sense of disorientation echoes Jean-Marc Bustamante’s photographic window works, which open outwards onto landscapes that feel at once familiar and eerily uncanny. Andreas Eriksson’s quiet, earthy photograph of a landscape featuring a large dug-out hole – a portal, perhaps -and meditative woodcut Shoji prints further the investigation into marginal spaces and blurs the boundary between positive and negative forms.
Exhibition text by Laura Fuglsang