closer to the sun
Duo exhibition with Nina K. Ekman, Arden Asbæk Gallery, Copenhagen, March - May 2023
From the Arden Asbæk Gallery exhibition text:
The duo exhibition Closer to the Sun is a bittersweet tribute to a lazy summer’s day. Warm skin, cold glasses of wine and prickly cactuses are everywhere to be found at Arden Asbæk Gallery, which has been transformed into what feels like a taverna. The duo exhibition, which presents the work of Polish painter Ania Pieranska and Norwegian visual artist Nina Ekman, encapsules summer heat, while also questioning the ambivalence of the rising temperatures and the state of the world through the artists’ careful and conscious approach to our resources. Warmth, often associated with comfort and indulgence, has in the recent decade grown to symbolize the demise of planetary stability.
Ania Pieranska’s paintings show people basking in the sun, charging their bodies like lizards or other cold-blooded creatures, and evening scenes with the slanted yellow lights reflected off the glasses on the café tables. With a background in architecture, the artist has a unique sense of creating worlds as well as an inherent focus on the world around us. Pieranska describes how we – while treating ourselves awfully seriously – often dismiss or even forget other forms of matter and energy. The artist places her new series of works focusing on light in a Dionysian context of eating, drinking, and devouring. Here, sunlight similarly becomes a resource, we consume and metabolize – metaphorically as well as literally – and her work becomes an overindulgent feast of light.
Nina Ekman’s fuzzy practice is hard to place as it floats between painting, textile, and sculpture, but always investigating themes such as sustainability, consumption, and the consequences of our planetary negligence. These themes also resonate in Ekman’s production as the artist mainly uses excess deadstock yarn from the textile industry to create her pieces. The dilemma of maintaining modern life, while preserving the globe, is a driving force in Ekman’s work, and the artist’s soft cacti, fragmented structures resembling indigenous totem poles, and her tufted backdrops become poignant reminders that nothing lasts forever. Neither does the summer.
all photos by Kevin Josias, courtesy of Arden Asbæk Gallery