Antonio de la Rosa and Exotic Maximum Chroma, and Mie Olise Kjærgaard Exhibitions
Y Gallery (319 Grand St.)
This event has ended.
Y Gallery presents two solo exhibitions, A Nontranscendental Monument, featuring work by Antonio de la Rosa, and Exotic Maximum Chroma, featuring the works of artist Mie Olise Kjærgaard. This is the first solo exhibition of de la Rosa and Olise Kjærgaard at Y Gallery.
With “A Nontranscendental Monument,” Antonio de la Rosa presents a still life which, like a swan song, fights to win and to survive the bloody battle against the inescapable imposition of transforming simple ideas and experiences into gold.
With this goal, De la Rosa erects a totemic construction trapped inside of an ephemeral sculpture, which precariously sustains a disjointed amalgam of elements. Some elements which, independent like individuals, defend the transitory character of existence, who breathe the spirit of resistance and propose a smile.
Mie Olise Kjærgaard works in painting, sculptural objects and installation. Since graduating with an MFA from Central St Martins in London in 2008, her work has focused on the theme of the ”man-made construction,” through which she investigates both the nature of architectural construction - as well as how a construction describes the society it is a part of.
For the past ten years, the significant symbol of the pineapple has been present in a majority of Olise Kjærgaard’s paintings. It symbolizes a foreign object, indicating that something has not been quite not right, that something exotichas been peeking into the Nordic, colder world that Olise Kjærgaard was presenting.
After research travels to Latin America for her solo exhibition at Museo de Arte Acarigua in Venezuela, Olise Kjærgaard found a completely new way of looking at constructions and ruins. Suddenly the ruins were not abandoned, but rather occupied immediately, with laundry hanging out of the windows.
For Exotic Maximum Croma at Y Gallery, the pineapple is suddenly not a foreign object; it’s at home. Olise Kjærgaard, throughout her ouvre, has used the pineapple as a crevice or maybe even a portal. She enters this portal into the world of the pineapple, which often represented a flooded world, with houses on stilts, kayaks and boats and people living in the palmtrees. Or, she would enter a fake Babylon setting with elephants on pedestals inspired by the filmIntolerance (1916) by DW Griffiths.
This world consists of many of the same objects that Olise Kjærgaard has worked with for many years. However, the saturated feeling of the exotic feels completely new. It might also seem like the color scheme on the other side of the portal is one that is inverted from Olise Kjærgaards previous works.
In the gallery space, there are paintings are hanging on stilts, as well as an instrument used by Olise Kjærgaard again and again (most recently in the bike and pedestrian bridge at the harbour at the city of Holbaek, Denmark, to be built in 2018).
Installing the work as constructions is a way for Olise Kjærgaard to connect her practice, which until 2016, was more divided into either painting or wooden installations.
Olise Kjærgaard has travelled to societies in different stages of disrepair: twice to the Arctic Circle, to investigate an abandoned Russian mine town, to The Pyramid; Spreepark in Berlin, and to Newfoundland in the tracks of the writer/character Espen Arnakke, which was the topic of the solo show at Kunsthalle Nikolaj, Denmark in 2012.
Olise Kjærgaard has exhibited at UMOCA - Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, MFAH - Museum of Fine Art Houston, MAAA - Museo de Arte Acarigua, Venezuela; Nikolaj Kunsthalle (DK), SNYK -Skive New Museum of Art, (DK), Torrance Art Museum in LA; Himmerlands Kunstmuseum(DK); Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston Texas; Honor Fraser, LA; Samuel Freeman, LA; Duve Berlin and Galleri Kant in Copenhagen.
Olise Kjærgaard holds an MFA from Central St. Martins in London and a Master in Architecture from Aarch, Aarhus(DK) + The Bartlett, UCL, London (UK). In recent years she has been based between London, New York and Copenhagen; travelling to residencies such as Iceland and Skowhegan.
Antonio de la Rosa was born in Zaragoza, Spain on June 8th, 1970. When possible he lives between Madrid and Mexico City. This week he is living in New York in order to prepare this show. We don’t know where he will die.
Media
Schedule
from May 06, 2017 to June 28, 2017
Opening Reception on 2017-05-06 from 16:00 to 21:00