Alex Colard

ABOUT the artist

Born 1975 in Aarhus. Lives and works in Copenhagen.

Astrid Kruse Jensen is a photography-based visual artist. She studied at The Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands and The Glasgow School of Art. In her works she explores the borderland between the apparent and the hidden, between the real and imaginary.

Astrid Krusen Jensen has been nominated for several awards, and in 2008 received The Niels Wessel Bagge’s Foundation for the Arts Award. She is a regular recipient of grants from The Danish Arts foundation. Astrid Kruse Jensen has had solo exhibition in Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, India and several group exhibitions in Europe, USA, Canda, Russia and China. Astrid Kruse Jensen’s works are in several private and public collection, including George Eastma House, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, The National Photography Museum, Denmark, Museet for Fotokunst, Manchester City Gallery, Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum, Artotheque de Caen, The John Kobal Foundation and The Danish Arts Foundation.

Astrid Kruse Jensen received the Anne Marie Telmányi’s honors award for female artists in March 2017. Nominated for Deutsche Börse Preis 2014 http://www.astridkrusejensen.com/

ABOUT the exhibition 

Wetterling Gallery is proud to announce, Floating, the danish photographer Astrid Kruse Jensens third solo exhibition at the gallery.  The exhibition takes place April 16 – May 22, 2021 with an opening reception on April 15, 3 – 7 pm. 

Astrid Kruse Jensen’s photographs takes the viewer to a parallel, timeless reality. She uses the medium of photography to show us more than the human eye can detect and a place that can only be reached through the photographic lens. In her work she is questioning the photographic media and its documentational qualities. Her latest series Floating revolves around memories in a state between a concrete and an abstract reality. Instead of depicting a specific place or person, Kruse Jensen’s work seems to picture a mental state of mind where the figures, nature and culture collide. In several of the works, the viewer is met by a strong backlight that gives a feeling of looking into infinity.

The meeting between light and darkness has long characterized Kruse Jensen’s work. In her early series, she worked with advanced technology and manipulated lighting to create contrast-rich and hyper-realistic images. In Floating, Kruse Jensen instead takes advantage of the technical limitations and uncontrollable chemical processes of the simple Polaroid camera she is using. The use of double exposures, backlight, long shutter times and camera movements results in motifs out of focus. The specific space is dissolved and erased, which together with the distinct color scheme in cyan and yellow, gives the works a painterly and poetic appearance.

Astrid Kruse Jensen was introduced to the Swedish audience with her solo exhibition Within the Landscape at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum in Stockholm in 2014. She has previously had gallery and museum exhibitions in Europe, Asia, and North America. She is represented in several public and private collections, among them are The National Museum of Photography (DK), The George Eastman House, Rochester (NY, USA), Artotheque de Caen (F), Manchester City Gallery (GB) and AROS, Aarhus Kunstmuseum (DK). Astrid Kruse Jensen was born in 1975 and lives and works in Copenhagen.

In conjunction to the exhibition, Astrid La Cour has written a text about Kruse Jensen’s series Floating. 

FLOATING

Astrid Kruse Jensen’s new works are equally specific photographic and distinctly painterly.
Interiors and landscapes are placed in an eternal exchange between a concrete and an
abstract reality. She works with photography’s ability to show us more than the human eye
can capture and thus open up a space that can only be depicted by the photographic
gaze. The soft modelling of darkness and the dazzling blur of light. Long exposures give the
light the opportunity, like strokes on the surface, to leave tracks of light and repetitions in
the subject. The motion of the camera creates ambiguousness and the intrusive layers of
structures and traces of the photographic chemistry create a displacement of reality.
Astrid Kruse places the photosensitive and chemical process at the center of an exploration
of the photographic medium, and in the works, she creates space for depicting the
processes visible and letting them play an important role in the process and content…
In Astrid Kruse Jensen’s new works, we move into a dreamlike universe from domestic
interiors and woodland lakes to the magnificent Icelandic landscape. When the woman
with her back turned against us and standing in the great open Icelandic landscape, in the
interior or by the woodland lake, her figure is merged into the tonal landscape of mood and
memory in a state that almost seems weightlessly floating. The woman is absorbed by the
surroundings, she is drawn behind the concrete memories and becomes part of the tonal
landscape or the interior spaces.
The close connection – and the constant alternation – between an inner and an outer world
can also be seen in Astrid Kruse Jensen’s depictions of the house as a construction with
both domestic associations and surreal undertones. The interiors become images of states
of mind rather than pictures of architectural spaces. Her use of backlight, double
exposures and slow shutter speeds dissolve the concrete and delimited form of the space,
and instead the interiors are transformed into more or less indefinite abstractions.
Throughout her career Astrid Kruse Jensen has been deeply fascinated with Iceland’s
uncontrollable nature, as is clear in many series of her work. Her fascination is due to both
an appealing for and profound reverence for the Icelandic landscape. In this exhibition the
interpretations are gathered into a more abstract image of a landscape that depends on
the premises of nature and is formed by both external influences and subterranean
activity, making her works mysteriously poetic and intangible reflections of the spiritual.
When interiors and landscapes are thus dissolved in abstractions over moods and states of
mind, Astrid Kruse Jensen opens up an endless borderland – a metaphysical universe
transcending time and space. In such a parallel world she evokes a human sense of being
an inseparable part of something larger, of letting go of the physical ties and becoming
one with landscapes and interiors.
The images revolve around states in a constantly changing world. The world we know can
be transformed in a split second, and when it happens, the experience of unreality can
arise. What one knew and previously took for granted is forever changed. In the attempt to
grasp the events, one’s mental state opens up for a new gaze at reality. One sees the same
thing, but never sees it the same way again. One does the same thing, but the sense of the
situation is never the same again. One looks inward and outward in one and the same
motion, which is neither reality nor fiction, but an abstraction over reality. Slipping in and
out of mental states and glimpsing clarity despite a growing awareness of the fragility and
perpetual uncertainty of everything. It is being present in several layers of existence
simultaneously and therefore also involves both powerlessness and hopeful energy. In this
transformative state landscapes, interiors and bodies are merged in an eternal alternation
between a concrete and an abstract reality.
Several of the works in the exhibition has a layer that looks like a starry sky. Small chunks of
light trickle out of the mountains or lie across the walls – and turn the focus on all that we
cannot see or explain, perhaps allowing us a glimpse of understanding of the infinity of the
universe.
Astrid Kruse Jensen depicts landscapes and interiors with the same photographic
approach, an approach that dissolves the motifs in what can evoke a cosmic infinity – not,
that is, with grand visual postulates, but with discreet, poetic suggestions of the
connectedness of everything in a metaphysical universe transcending time and space. A
humbleness of the fact that the earth has its own life, a life that has existed for several
billion years while we humans have only been a small and perhaps transitory part of its
surface.
Just as memory is a dynamic form that never ceases, the space, the landscape and the
photographic material is in flow in Astrid Kruse Jensen’s new works. Her photographs
contradict the notion of the photograph as a moment fixed in time. In this way she
inscribes the works in a living process where the motifs, the material and memory become
one and form part of a larger narrative about states of awareness and being, malleable
and dislocated memory.
The ethereal appearance and the visible chemical traces make the photograph appear
processual, as if they are simultaneously being developed and fading out, set in motion
away from the concrete rendering of reality and nearer to a mental state. In this vacuum
between dream and reality Astrid Kruse Jensen examines the concept of memory as a
state of awareness, a form of poetic displacement of reality.
Astrid La Cour, 2019

ABOUT the gallery 

Wetterling Gallery is one of the leading galleries for contemporary art in Scandinavia, with a dynamic program of both highly internationally acclaimed artists, and young upcoming artists from Sweden.

Founded in 1978, we consider ourselves a long-term partner for our artists, collectors, institutions and the general public that plays a significant role for the development of the both the local and the international art scene. With a history of bringing international artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Frank Stella to Sweden we are today also presenting Swedish artists to the international art scene. Our vision is to provide a platform for dialogue and meetings between different forms of artistic expression, and between people.

The gallery arranges six exhibitions annually in the main space in Stockholm, and around the same number in the project space that was inaugurated in 2015, allowing the gallery program to be more dynamic. Wetterling Gallery also have a showroom in Gothenburg, where a curated selection of our collections is shown on regular basis.

Please note that out exhibition programme is researched and developed well in advance and we are unable to accept unsolicited approches for meetings, exhibitions or projects.  https://www.wetterlinggallery.com/