Artist: Kirsten Ortwed
Exhibition title: presents
Venue: palace enterprise, Copenhagen, Denmark
Date: February 22 – April 6, 2024
Photography: all images courtesy of the artist and palace enterprise, Copenhagen
[There is no fanfare. Thick drama curtains aren’t hoisted above any spectacular act. A dutiful or exalted applause is neither expected nor given. Facts are. And facts are usually met with a different kind of static awe.
And facts are not the same as answers.
And a long conversation usually benefits from a lot of questions.
And some conversations benefit from being unpacked in front of an audience]
Four sculpting decades are a lot of presents. And few other things need somewhat staged presentations like finished artworks do. Few other things leave visible traces like solid materials do. Few other things are crystallizations of a very particular now than things cast into shape. Isn’t a hardening essentially one single second being held on to and made long-lasting. Preservations of past presents.
Wax behind bars. Such solid clouds wanting to evaporate or melt down the walls to become a chunky pool of something rain-colored, but they’re held in place. A still life of tools rather than precious ripeness in baroque goblets, and the tools, too, are obstructed. When something is caged, it is either cared for or constrained, maybe both. Balconies might be romance or poetry when they’re all ivy -clad patina and sunset booze, and they might be concrete when they’re all solid and function: elevating a substance from the ground, framing something very elementary. Offering rest or display to these accumulations of allegedly normal matter that also appears indifferent to pedestalization altogether. Beauty is not rejected; it just isn’t pursued.
But aren’t beautiful things also most trembling when their beauty is not the first thing that leaps into your eyes. You might notice how the strictness of geometry is being fucked over a bit by a mud-looking landscape of the flattest possible greyness. Or that a grate’s hard predictability shatters an image much like how a gaze that has just been asleep can be shattered. Only later, perhaps much later or perhaps never, the realization follows that these metallic encounters do in fact possess something stunning. That arbitrariness doesn’t eliminate precision, and that other people’s precise perceptions of reality are some of the most satisfying to look at. A cute little skunk lump hanging as the bait it always is. No theatre, just real presents.
[Certain sculptures resemble factuality, perhaps more than any other medium Is it their non-figuration
Is it their mundane materiality
Is a broom or a piece of string more factual than, say, a pearl or something gilded Is coincidence more objective than intention]
By Nanna Friis
