Galerie Mikael Andersen would like to welcome you to the opening of Eske Kath’s solo exhibition Containing Landscapes with new paintings by the artist, Thursday 22 April 2021, 3-7pm.

Containing Landscapes has a double meaning: The title can mean that landscapes are physically contained but also that they are cognitively contained. This ambiguity is the focal point of Eske Kath’s latest exhibition. The abstractions across the vast inner and outer landscapes are tethered and twisted onto the canvases. They are stretched into the three basic shapes: triangle, circle and square; forcing the landscape’s unwieldy expanses and intangible indications of an uncertain future into a controlled and reassuring form.

Eske Kath explores a fundamental uncertainty that is a condition of our time. Where humanity’s imprint radically changes the climate and landscape as well as our basic understanding of our role in nature and in the world. It is a time where we must accommodate not just the localised landscape in our minds, but that of our entire world, not just the tangible global landscape and nature under enormous pressure, but also the vast political landscapes and fear of a future apocalyptic landscape.

With Containing Landscapes, Eske Kath gives his take on what a landscape painting can be in a time where the landscape we must contain and relate to is no longer a local landscape, but a global abstract landscape with a myriad of vanishing points.

The concepts of degradation and construction have been a long running theme in Kath’s work and his motifs can often be seen as a balancing point where both are possible. In his paintings, the disturbing and violent become ornamental, contorted and beautiful. Are the powerful suns on their way down or on their way to shed light on a new day? The post-apocalyptic expanses in the artist’s paintings are also an outlook to the creation of new, both inner and outer, landscapes.

Eske Kath (b. 1975) studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art (1997-2004). He lives and works in Copenhagen and his work can be found in a number of collections including Aros Museum of Contemporary Art in Århus, Arken Museum of Modern Art and Sammlung Essl Museum of Contemporary Art in Vienna.