Alice Folker Gallery is pleased to present In Motion, a solo exhibition by Asger Harbou Gjerdevik. Across a series of paintings, Gjerdevik unfolds a playful fragmentation of motifs and references. Seashells, fingerprints, birds, and flames surface in changing forms, creating connections between the intimate and the monumental, the humorous and the profound. The fragmentary and repetitive serve as a basis for Gjerdevik's exploration of mass culture and modern life. His compositions skillfully balance the figurative and the abstract, testing the narrative potential of symbols and how human consciousness, both individual and collective, interprets them.
Entering visual artist Asger Harbou Gjerdevik’s solo exhibition is like walking down a winding path, through a net of tightly woven references that alternate between strangeness and familiarity, impulsivity and reflexion, seriousness and humour, simplicity and complexity, brightness and pastel. Through repetitions in colours, patterns, and symbols, Gjerdevik creates a coherence in the seemingly fragmented. Like a web of interconnected threads – or an album, where a new song replaces the previous and where ballads, beat, and blues appear as part of a whole as well as entities on their own. As viewers we are invited into this intriguing universe, where we are confronted not only with the meaning of the many references to the art history, modernity and materiality, but with the meaning of meaning itself.
Conchs, seashells, birds, flames, and fingerprints emerge as recurring motifs in the exhibition. In French Summer, the artist’s fingerprint appears as part of a pattern in the background, while in PARADISE, the same fingerprint constitutes a circular symbol within the symbol and finally, it materializes as a massive projection in the works SATIN & VELVET and PAPILLON. By employing the same symbol in different sizes, contexts, and colours, Gjerdevik questions our immediate associations, references, and meaning makings. On the one hand, the fingerprint is a symbol of identity – perhaps most clearly in the work PAPILLON, borrowing its title from a book, in which a man is imprisoned for a murder he may not have committed – and where the fingerprint is the one thing that remains when all other markers of identity disappear. At the same time, it can be understood as a reference to a modern society where we constantly use the biometric signature to create access. Not only when we unlock our smartphones, but as a ticket to move unhindered through an airport or get a new passport. It can also be regarded as a play with the artist’s signature on the artwork, pointing back to the significance of the signature in art history or the significance of a signature and writing itself. In this way, the works examine how meanings arise and change. Perspective is not only invoked in a concrete sense across the works, as the relative size of a seashell or fingerprint in comparison to the road ahead, but also in an abstract sense, as a question of context and what we attribute meaning to. Should the story of a suffering convict or the seashell dominate the space? By turning this upside down, in the most literal sense, Gjerdevik’s works seem to insist on the significance of the large just as the small moments – becoming a father and finding a seashell – everything finds its place on his path.
In the work SIGN O’ THE TIMES, the teasing statement “no style, no problems” appears side by side with hoodies and fangs, like a fusion of a Dracula movie poster and an abstract painting. Likewise, typographic elements are found in Always Forward, which with its four panels appears as a study in materials, techniques, shapes, and colours – as a coloristic experiment, where different styles are woven into a complex collage of expressions and impressions in an investigation of how a work becomes a whole. PARADISE is the only work in the exhibition that is created as an actual collage and perhaps, this is where we find the clearest reference to motions and movements in the creation process of the works. From the hand that picks the apple from the tree, to the mouth that takes a bite of it, the gaze that photographs the half-eaten apple and then scans the image to the computer, which prints it in 12 sheets, which are subsequently glued to the raw canvas, where it becomes the focal point of the work. Like the apple from the Garden of Eden, it is surrounded by other figures and shapes in the painting: an orange sun, two birds or brackets that occupy the centre of the image, and perhaps, the outlines of what could resemble Edvard Munch’s The Scream – an easily recognizable and iconic motif, which is associated with intense anxiety or perhaps, in Gjerdevik’s works, with intense joy. Like the work In Motion, painted shortly after his daughter was born, it contains an almost euphoric feeling of happiness, energy, and movement, which we as viewers are invited into.
In FORTUNE FADED, a motif emerges against a backdrop of brushstrokes that at first glance brings to mind Per Kirkeby’s abstract landscapes. Similarly, they were painted on a hard surface, while the canvas was only subsequently stretched onto a frame. The figurative contour in the foreground leaves the associations open. It could be the outline of a conch shell, but upon closer inspection it seems more like angel wings spreading across the abstract landscape, an inverted latissimus dorsi, or is it a world map with hints of Africa and South America converging as the Earth’s tectonic plates move towards each other? The MTV logo in the right corner acts almost like a stamp – its own signature – that frames the work in the classic 4:3 TV format. A tender nostalgic reference to the program’s cult-like status in the 1990s, where it almost became emblematic of every teenage bedroom. As viewers, we are left with a multitude of sensory impressions in the encounter with a mixture of techniques, materials, and genres, just as MTV allowed fusing different art forms into music, film, and creative experiments back then. At the same time, we find an eye for composition in Gjerdevik’s works that, in combination with controlled technique and liberated experimentation, create a meticulously curated narrative, where the choice of letting Fat Boy Slim, Prodigy, and Nelly Furtado play back-to-back is not accidental, but the result of a carefully selected configuration of colours, shapes, and references from a palette of endless possibilities.
As a constant flow – in motion – the works cannot be fixed and defined as one rather than the other. They are a both-and. We recognize the MTV logo, a fingerprint, a conch shell, or glimpse an outline of what could resemble The Scream, while at the same time encountering an openness in shapes, colours, and format that is not immediately connected to what we know. In this way, the works reflect Gjerdevik’s playful approach to art, where meanings are not always revealed, but remain hidden – as if the work is hiding a secret that reveals itself over time as the references are deciphered. In this way, the works escape a fixed form of reading and open up to a stream of changing emotions, understandings, and interpretive spaces that perhaps best characterize Gjerdevik’s artistic practice.
