Asger Dybvad Larsen at Gether Contemporary

Artist: Asger Dybvad Larsen

Exhibition title: Estimated Time of Arrival

Venue: Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark

Date: September 27 – November 9, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen

At Asger Dybvad Larsen’s second solo exhibition Estimated Time of Arrival at Gether Contemporary, he highlights the arrival and creation process of his works. Here he has put together small washed linen pieces in black and gray shades for canvases of two by three meters. A large number of stitches hold them together and testify to the per-vasive repetition of hand work for a month and a half per work. It is an almost rhythmic dedication to the work done by the artist. A rhythm that is mirrored in the composition of the exhibited works – a reverse T frequents all four textile surfaces as a pulsating beat.

Using the reverse T composition, Asger Dybvad Larsen references works by modern painters such as Aurelie Nemours, Albert Mertz, Carmen Herrera, Blinky Palermo, Kazmir Malevich and Olga Rozanova. The bar at the base of the works establishes a quiet horizon, but is interrupted by the abrupt vertical line. The middle thus stops the experience of the painting’s calmness and divides it into two. Like a pillar, it references the transition we know from the cartoon’s white void between sequences. It is a vertical strategy that should not be understood as a shape or image. As the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard recounts in Barnet Newman’s works, the line should instead be regarded as a disruptive act that depicts the present moment. It is the life sign of the heart that declares that time and life go on. By this, Dybvad Larsen confronts the rhythmic repetition of the works with the absolute moment that, as two temporal views, is allowed to coexist in the exhibition.

In each side of the works, motifs from earlier paintings by Asger Dybvad Larsen are repeated. Here he presents his back catalog of painting trays and accumulations of squares and builds on them. Nothing has been finalized and completed, for Asger Dybvad Larsen is constantly arriving in new places by working on the past. But one can easily confuse repetition with recognition. Recalling the prior tricks the brain into assuming the exact similarity of the mo-tifs. The repeated inverted T’s first appear uniform, after which you immediately spot that in each of the four works a new translation of the subject is at stake.

The rhythmic repetition serves as a painterly strategy that causes variations in each beat to appear. Asger Dybvad Larsen is thus experimenting with the inevitable changes in the repitition, and the works become an open question about what happens in the variation with the meanings of the signefiers.

Asger Dybvad Larsen lives and works in Aarhus, Denmark. In 2017 he graduated from the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts. He has exhibited widely internationally at among others Galerie Rolando Anselmi in Berlin and Rome and Geukens & de Vil Gallery in Knokke, Belgium, where he is also represented. In addition, he has exhibited at Pablo’s birthdays in New York, L21, Mallorca, Nordic Contemporary, Paris, Fabbrica Orobia, Milan, Arroniz Gallery, Mexico City, Ernesto Esposito Collection, Naples, Galeria Boavista, Lisbon, Larm Gallery, Copenhagen, Rod Barton, London, Brask Collection, Munkeruphus, Gilleleje and others. In 2017 he received 15th June Foundation’s Art Prize and in 2018 he has been awarded a grant from the Lepsien Art Foundation in Düsseldorf. In 2017 Roulette Rousse pub-lished the book SPOR 1 about Asger Dybvad Larsen in conversation with Marie Nipper & Victoria Marie Christensen. Asger Dybvad Larsen is represented in the collections, of among others, AROS, Aarhus and CCA Collection, Andratx, Mallorca.