Artists: Chino Amobi, Lea Porsager, Ursula Reuter Christiansen and Bizarro
Exhibition title: There Should Have Been Roses
Venue: Huset for Kunst & Design, Holstebro, Denmark
Date: November 25, 2023 – March 10, 2024
Photography: ©David Stjernholm / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Huset for Kunst & Design, Copenhagen
Note: Exhibition’s floor plan is available here
”Let us vary the areas so we forget where we are” says the French writer, painter, and landscape architect Carmontelle about his work with Parc Monceau in Paris at the end of the 18th century. A century later, J. P. Jacobsen adds to this with the sentence ”One could think of a Proverb here. The scenery would be a good fit for a Proverb” – a phrase that suddenly appears in his short story ”There should have been Roses”.
There was a time when the painter was asked to make landscapes from paintings. And the author expanded landscapes psycho-actively by inventing new colors and placing emotions within them. Proverbs often confirm the agreed upon reality. Art advertises the experienced nature. Nature is dirty. Is art itself dirty enough to process all the dirt in the world?
This exhibition takes the form of a garden, a small park. Here you can wander and look, walk and think, pause to entertain a thought or read a few lines. Halfway through you are offered nourishment for the rest of your short journey. Should there have been a few more roses? Or are there plenty?
“There should have been roses
Of the large, pale yellow ones.
And they should hang in abundant clusters over the garden-wall, scattering their tender leaves carelessly down into the wagon-tracks on the road: a distinguished glimmer of all the exuberant wealth of flowers within.
And they should have the delicate, fleeting fragrance of roses, which cannot be seized and is like that of unknown fruits of which the senses tell legends in their dreams. Or should they have been red, the roses?
Perhaps.”
Chino Amobi’s painted flowers span a universal, cosmic decadence across time, from historical fin- de-siecle painting of tulips into contemporary technological captivity. The flowers are prospe-rity and decay at the same time, nourished and conditioned by their own economic system.
Lea Porsager’s windmill blades have moved from the landscape outside; felled, cut and raised like tall vessels, like vases from a giant – containers for all that should have been. The sculptures both contain and release heightened states of energy; sexual, green, dimensional. Energies that have been stored in their body from the perpetual motion they were created to perform.
On the lovers’ path connecting the two spaces, before the last stretch of the promenade, you can enjoy Italian chocolate made from a secret recipe. The small, round chocolate wrapped in gold paper was originally modeled after a rose bud. Follow the dating trail of petals into the final area of the garden! Here are two pictures of Ursula Reuter Christiansen. They show two crude figures; washerwomen from before the laundry machine automated the washing of clothes in large parts of the world. The paintings produce a critical romanticization of traditional women’s labor, a por-trait of working conditions in conjunction with the artist’s overall work with women’s liberation.
Suddenly it gets late, and as darkness settles over the garden like a spongy shadow the landscape changes character and is illuminated by the clear, unpolluted night sky – a so-called Dark Sky©. At this time, this place, body, soul, and mind connect through long moments of presence. Should there have been more? Perhaps there should have been some wind to whirl and gently push the soft, natural objects. And some guests who could hike and climb in all that is dirty. Who could pick the flowers and give them away, exchange them for instant joy?
-Bizarro
