Morten Buch
New Paintings
12 Oct – 17 Nov 2018
Morten Buch’s solo exhibition New Paintings is an eclectic presentation of the potentials of painting, showing cartoon-like motifs with black contouring lines mixed with sculpture-looking objects, collage-like color compositions and works painted wet-in-wet in one continuous movement. Several of the exhibited works originate from sketches quickly drawn on an iPhone. The lightness and pace of this medium is maintained in the final paintings, which are characterized by humor and playful gestures.
The composition of the painted color formations and the more recognizable drawn objects all together creates a kind of unfulfilled relation between the elements, resulting in a vibrant tension between drawing and color, between surface and perspective. As with the work Arrival where fragments of a checkered picnic blanket are visible here and there, inviting the viewer into the image and for a moment breaking with the otherwise collage-like flatness of the painting.
The works draw inspiration from familiar everyday objects – a vase, a shoe, a crutch etc. – as well as the use of mass culture, design and decorative elements seen through the lens of Pop Art. The same motifs are duplicated on the canvas or appear in several works, jumping from one painting to the next. Morten Buch even works with double images in gray tones so that two works appear parallel as each other’s double. The potentially infinite repetition of motifs is used both as a concept in the paintings, but also in a very literal sense in a wallpaper created by Buch. Here, the repetitive concept reaches its utmost when exclamation marks are multiplied on paper in a wordless exclamation.
The exhibition New Paintings can be seen as a continuation of Morten Buch’s long-time work with the picnic motif, something that is also present in Buch’s upcoming solo exhibition Picnic at Kastrupgårdsamlingen. For this particular exhibition he has created a series of monotypes, all of which relate to the picnic situation’s encounter between nature and culture, naturalness and artificiality, language and abstract formation. The exhibition Picnic is a collaboration between Kastrupgårdsamlingen and Horsens Kunstmuseum.