Galerie Mikael Andersen would like to welcome you to the opening of SKUMRINGSMALERI (english: Nightfall Painting) with new paintings by Leonard Forslund, on Friday 3 May 2019, 5-7 pm.

Fragmented and reassembled woodscapes meet the viewer in Leonard Forslund’s new series of dusk paintings. In these works, where lonesome human figures are depicted in the ambivalent borderland of twilight, peculiar meetings between individual and nature are staged.

The collage-like compositions of the paintings seem both shattered and indefinite. The black, blue and violet evening pastels of the sky are divided by the foreground’s wide tree trunks, while the treetop’s patterns of branches and leaves split the canvas space into small irregular areas. Between the trees are secluded houses and architectural relics of domed church spaces. The flickering contours of the buildings seem to be dissolving; at first sight, they look like overgrown ruins which have languished in the woods for a hundred years. Most of the elements in the wooden lands of the paintings could, in fact, be considered as stage settings, which are imperceptibly lowered from the ceiling, come sliding in from the sides or rise from hidden trapdoors in the forest soil.

And here, exposed in the depth of the forest, stand or lie lonely human figures. Forslund has picked these people from very different contexts; they are remediated motives selected from random corners of the internet and details from the artist’s private photographs; fragments removed from their context and meticulously painted in oil. In one painting, a sleeping beauty lies on the forest soil and in another a figure seems lost in thoughts in the shadow of a tree. These characters appear to be caught in moments of bewildered paralysis; they seem introvert in a manner that looks both timid and heartfelt, and at the same time the viewer senses a quiet sense of humor in these depictions – what sort of visions of nature are these people experiencing?

The majestic forest landscapes of the paintings, their clear emphasis on the foregrounds’ details and the figures facing away from the viewer make one think of Caspar David Friedrich and the Romantic painters of nature, while at the same time evoking the memory of English Pre-Raphaelite artists such as John Everett Millais. However, whereas the sublime nature is a well-known Romantic topos, in Forslund’s works it leaves the viewer with the urgent question of how one is to comprehend the relation between individual and nature in today’s world. The artist’s quiet statements scatter like the flickering evening sky of his paintings as they invite the audience to renegotiate their stagnated categories. Are human beings left behind in their own nature, uncomprehending of the fact that they, too, are actors in this grand reality

Leonard Forslund (b. 1959 in Sweden) is educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, 1988. Forslund is represented at Statens Museum for Kunst, Aros, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Forslund received the Eckersberg Medaille in 2009, and his works are in the collection of Statens Kunstfond, Statens Konstråd in Sweden and Ny Carlsbergfondet. The artist lives and works in Denmark.

For more information on the exhibition and for press photos please contact the gallery on tel. 33 33 05 12 or email: cph@mikaelandersen.com. The exhibition ends 8 June 2019. Daily opening hours: Tuesday-Friday 12-18, Saturday 11-15.

Photos: Jan Søndergaard.