Artist: Rolf Nowotny
Exhibition title: COMP NUMB LIMB
Venue: Huset for Kunst & Design, Holstebro, Denmark
Date: June 24 – September 24, 2023
Photography: ©David Stjernholm / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Huset for Kunst & Design, Copenhagen
COMP NUMB LIMB is an exhibition by the Danish artist Rolf Nowotny. In the exhibition, we are taken through three scenarios – from the large, grey-painted brick reliefs of the first room, to the whitewashed corridor, and on to the last room, all in red and covered with battens and chicken netting.
The works in the exhibition are actors and props in a grotesque chamber play. The reliefs are painted in the color Eigengrau. It is the color you see with your eyes closed in a darkened room, and it is also called Eigenlicht (eye light) and Brain Gray. It is a shadow world that is portrayed here, the child’s world and a state between waking and dreaming. The reliefs become the child’s big eyes and we find ourselves in the middle of this dreamed architecture or of the very being of the child. The barrier between dream and reality, fantasy and reality lies like an invisible membrane across the exhibition, and in the middle of this stands a clown with four arms and four legs. It keeps a moving eye and a flickering gaze with these different states or interfaces.
The corridor between the two exhibition spaces is made clear as a transition – in COMP NUMB LIMB it is the transition from a dreamy state to a more nightmarish one. The red floor and the red walls in the room at the end might warn us of boundaries that should not be crossed.
Kitty Horrorshow, with whom Rolf Nowotny has worked in the past, has created the text “The Palmist” for the exhibition which reads, among other things, as follows: “He moves like a mirror, and he laughs without a mouth. I don’t know why he’s laughing, and I think if I knew I wouldn’t like it, but the sound makes me happy … I don’t know if I can make my arms bend like his, and it’s getting harder and harder to get out of bed each day. ”
The child’s dreamlike vision penetrates the walls of the house and exposes not only the bricks here, but also the world of the adults. COMP NUMB LIMB scratches the norms which are woven into family life, parenting, in society and culture and makes the familiar strange and porous. The darker sides of family life – inherited myths, disputes and sorrows, for example – and the difficulty of having to belong and be included in fixed communities are hidden, but feel present nevertheless. Like the gray color behind the eyelids, the exhibition finds itself in the borderland between light and dark, the familiar and the unknown.
Rolf Nowotny (b. 1978) lives and works in Copenhagen. He graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009 and has since exhibited widely in Denmark and abroad, including at Arken in Ishøj, Kunsthal Aarhus, Museo Pietro Canonica in Rome and at Momentum – 9th Nordic Biennial for Contemporary Art in Moss, Norway. In 2014 he received the Niels Wessel Bagge Art Fund’s Legacy and in 2021 the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s Legacy.
Kitty Horrorshow is the pseudonym of an independent video game developer that creates surreal and atmospheric 3D horror games.
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He moves like a mirror, and he laughs without a mouth. I don’t know why he’s laughing, and I think if I knew I wouldn’t like it, but the sound makes me happy. Someone in this house is happy, even if he’s only ever happy in the dark when I’m trying to sleep.
One day last year, I woke up and my room was filled with pictures. They were all over the walls, from up near the ceiling to down on the floor. I could tell they were his, because they were covered in his big soft handprints, and they all looked like they’d been folded four ways so that they were like snowflakes. Crayon wax snowflakes made of houses and dogs and shining suns and red cars and wolves with six eyes and postmen and dinosaurs. I stared at them all day and I felt happy because it was the biggest gift anyone had ever given me. Mother and father took them all down later that day. I can only remember a few of them now.
I wish I could learn a little more about him. I’m not always happy that he’s around, like when I see his chest through the window and know that he’s clinging to the wall outside, or when I leave the closet door open a little and I see his face through the crack. But even despite those things, I miss him when he’s gone. The pictures taught me a little about how he sees, and that was nice, but the pictures are gone now. I can’t ask him about himself because he doesn’t have a mouth. His language is made of arm-twitches and the way he twists his neck around and the way the colors of his skin change. I don’t know how to understand those, and I don’t think I can learn. I want to know what his room looks like. I think it would be nice to know what he hangs on his walls; if he sleeps in a bed like me, or in a pool of stagnant water; if there are lights, or candles, or windows, or grates in the ceiling, or television screens, or stuffed animals. If it looks anything at all like the kind of room I sleep in, or if it would frighten me to see because of how not-like-me it is.
But I can’t ask him. I think the only way I could learn is to start to move like him and try to follow him when he goes away. But I don’t know if I can make my arms bend like his, and it’s getting harder and harder to get out of bed each day. Nobody else comes over to see me anymore. I don’t know what to do, except to hope that he doesn’t leave, even if sometimes it makes me sick to my stomach that he’s there.
“The Palmist”
-Kitty Horrorshow, 2023
