Marie Søndergaard Lolk, Kirsten Ortwed
Kirsten Ortwed & Marie Søndergaard Lolk
22 Nov 2013 – 11 Jan 2014
Metallic materials, writes Cardan, are to mountains no other than trees and have their roots, trunk, branches and leaves. What is a mine if not a plant covered with earth?
– Mircea Eliade: The Forge and the Crucible
Kirsten Ortwed’s new bronze sculptures are studies for a public commision in Hjorthagen, Stockholm. The titles of the sculptures, such as The Pusher, The Poet or The Demonstrator, could be read as references to archetypes in our social space. Beyond these anthropomorphic links the sculptures are simultaneously relating to nature, to earth, rhizomes and branches, to growth and decay. The works seem both raw and fragile. They accentuate their own process, the transport between materials and traces of the body’s transformation of matter. Kirsten Ortwed also shows a series of new aluminium reliefs pointing back to the polystyrene material they have been carved from. The difference between aluminium and what looks like polystyrene is repeated in other works, for example in the difference between ceramics and gold, or bronze and clay. Material ambiguities such as these underline that one material in Ortweds sculptural work always contain other materials (and other material experiences) that are also virtually present in the work situation.
It is hard to say where the two hyperboles begin; the one of the too sharp eye, and the other of the landscape that sees itself confusedly under the heavy lids of its stagnant water.
– Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space
Marie Søndergaard Lolk’s works are based on a rematerialization of the medium of painting through various processes and techniques. This rematerialization effects a slowing down of our normal visual reading and – at the same time – an opening towards a kind of microperception of things as they exist prior to their identification in more general categories. Content and expression are brought into a more literal clash as when for example curving field tracks are painted on a door mat woven in a spiral shaped pattern. In the text-based paintings word-images are transformed into ornamental structures where the disappearance of conventional semantic meaning allows for another perception of the now abstract words as actions and movements. The acrylic paint are reinvented in the paintings as plastic substance and layered material following the law of gravity just like any other object. In the smaller pixed-based paintings it is paint itself that literally holds the painting surface together, which in these cases are assembled of small strips of wood. Lolk’s paintings differ a lot from each other, they are hermetic, abject, blunt, amorphic, blurred, precise, and other things as well. Many of them relate to landscapes.