Gas9Gallery is a new gallery initiative in Copenhagen led and owned by art historian Christina Wilson. Gas9 strives to represent and collaborate with highly talented artists who are original in their thinking and constantly push the boundaries of aesthetics and content.
For the show at Art Rotterdam 2023, we present two danish artists that examine the materials, systems and rhythms of the world.
Maiken Bent's sculptures are both poetic, complex and provocatively raw. They constantly causes our gaze and imagination to slide back and forth from hard to soft, from figure to abstraction, and from the immediately masculine to the feminine. Bent's works thereby opens up a multitude of connotations and contrasts which put together presents an investigation of the agency of objects and people's (excessive) worship of the beautified. We are led by heavy chains, to colorful ceramics and fixed carabiners, onto slender pipes and neat sewing, to collections of various tools and buckles. Each hand-sewn stitch seems to chain our bodies together with the art works - a symbol of our close connections to the materials and objects in the world.
Through painting, and a transgression of its classic form, danish artist Mikkel Ørsted combines colorful pigments and unconventional brushstrokes, with patterned textiles, wooden constructions, and ceramics, in an attempt to take the world apart and reassemble it. The methodology is a set of poetic-mathematical formulas that create harmonies of the world's noise and place the viewer in the middle of its complex aesthetic landscape.