Anette H Flensburg, The light, the wind, the paper

Stockholm, 15.5–15.6  2014

Galleri Andersson/Sandström proudly presents “The light, the wind, the paper” – a solo exhibition featuring new paintings by award-winning Anette H Flensburg. In fictive and seemingly endless rooms Flensburg continues to examine the fragile and the momentary within the act of painting through the help of light, wind and paper.

Anette H. Flensburg, born 1961, graduated from the art and design school in Kolding, Denmark. In later years she has been acclaimed as one of Scandinavia’s leading painters and in 2004 she won second prize of the prestigious Carnegie Art Award. In 2008 she was re-nominated for the same award.

In “The light, the wind, the paper” Flensburg continues to investigate spaces. The motifs in Flensburg´s last series are, as before, paper models of rooms, with a fragile and temporary character reflected in the paintings. The rooms are staged with standing, lying or hanging paper caught in the moment right before the delicate structure collapses like a house of cards.

Using light and shadows Flensburg creates a frail skeletal structure in her pieces. The wind takes hold of a corner of a paper, forcing it to an angle that gives life to another shadowy figure – also evanescent. Flensburg captures something temporary, and in the transformation from paper model to a painting a new room is created. In several of the larger paintings a sense of infinity appears; the eye can roam further and further into its chambers and almost sense the continuing places beyond what can be seen.

As in previous series, these works comprise a strong cinematic character, but the scenographic effects are held back by a taut, clean and formal structure and color palette in order to create an “unsentimental space” with sentimental potential. The story is left open to the viewer. In this way, the paintings place themselves in a tradition that stretches back to Vermeer and Hammershøi, via Mondrian and Malevich to contemporary photographers such as Thomas Demand. The phenomenological and existential examination that follows through Flensburg’s oeuvre is here accompanied by a personal dimension that gives this exhibition and her overall exhibits an additional facet – like the sides of a crystal.

Galleri Andersson/Sandström has collaborated with Anette H Flensburg for almost 10 years and this is her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Anette H Flensburg is represented in the collections and the institutions like Statens Konstråd, Statens Kunstfond (DK), Malmö Konstmuseum, KUNSTEN – Museum of Modern Art Aalborg (DK), Trapholt Kunstmuseum (DK), and Ny Carlsbergfondet (DK).