Keith Farquhar and Torben Ribe at ORTHUNGA, Vordingborg

FOR NOW is a two-person exhibition by Keith Farquhar and Torben Ribe.

Farquhar presents a new series of works in which diaristic images, drawn directly from his phone, are transferred through dye sublimation onto polyester fur. The process produces a strange surface where much of the image is pressed flat while the pile splays out at the edges of the stretcher. The surface still feels alive, but it becomes difficult to locate whose life it contains. Four short videos sharing the same banal subject matter also feature. Assembled from accidental recordings and unintended clips found amongst the source images for the fur works, they draw on what Farquhar describes as the video equivalent of a pocket call.

Ribe presents a selection of works that move between sculpture, painting and the duties of caretaking. His abstract TV stands, made using the welding machine of sculptor Robert Jacobsen and decorated with images of his father, serve as displays for Farquhar’s videos. New paintings on woodchip wallpaper are shown alongside a small stall of handmade objects produced by his children. Several blown bulbs in ORTHUNGA’s central chandelier have been replaced with whatever festive alternatives happened to be available online.

Keith Farquhar (b. 1969) lives and works in Edinburgh.

Farquhar’s work draws on the often-overlooked elements that form the background ambience of contemporary life. Through everyday images, materials and technological processes, familiar subjects are transformed and reframed, providing clues to activities undertaken or observed first-hand. Farquhar is interested in how activity, labour and lived experience become registered in material form, and in how accepted signs of authenticity can become unstable or clichéd when repeated and taken as evidence of value.

Previous exhibitions include Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux; Kunsthalle Fribourg; Office Baroque, Antwerp; High Art, Paris; Cabinet, London and Neue Essener Kunstverein, Essen.

Torben Ribe (b. 1978) lives and works in Vordingborg.

Ribe’s work often examines the interrelationship of everyday-life aesthetics and practicality with the autonomous artwork. With formal art as his recurrent subject of endless scrutiny, Ribe is interested in how painted, commercial, and private pictures are influenced by the mutual relationship between them and how the socio-political reality often clashes with the painterly process.

Previous exhibitions include Overgaden. Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; NRW-Forum Düsseldorf; AROS, Århus; Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto; Grand Century, New York; Galerie Hussenot, Paris and KUMU Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn.