Artworks made by graduating students
Step into a world of exciting art at Next House Copenhagen, where you can experience works created by young talents. We challenged six talented graduates from Charlottenborg Kunsthal to create impressive works for our hostel, and now it is Professor Bjørn Nørgaard who is in charge of selecting the best of them.
Do you want to know more about the graduates' thoughts behind their works? Read on here!
Josephine Kamoun Johansson – City Life
City Life will be a large machine-woven tapestry, mounted on one of the concrete walls in the lounge room. The illustration is created digitally by hand, portraying the city of Copenhagen through the lens of a young person trying to navigate their way through life.
By creating a tapestry using a digital Jacquard loom to weave this image, City Life will be a work turning multiple conventional connotations upside down, both in its imagery and its material process. The ordinary map of a city is expected to be generic, with information that is easy to read.
In City Life, the city of Copenhagen is portrayed by voices in speech bubbles, small cartoon figures, stereotypes, instructions and poetic phrases.
Weaving is traditionally associated with something handmade, with immersion and slowness, seen as an artistic craft which is labour-intensive and perhaps even an antithesis to urban life.
As City Life will be a tapestry created digitally and be machine-woven, this will further illustrate the eccentric and individualistic approach of the work.
City Life is a large tapestry, 2133 mm wide and 1574 mm heigh. It is made out of 99% recycled cotton. It is mounted on a metal bar which will span across the back of the upper edge of the tapestry. The metal bar is carefully sewn into the tapestry and then attached to the wall.
Laurits Malthe Gulløv – Voyage Vision
The reliefs are made of brass, which is related to the building's brass-clad exterior facade. The brass used consists of collected brass plates produced in the 50s and 60s as travel souvenirs.
The motifs, which are embossed into the metal, are stylized depictions of tourist destinations, buildings, meals, fruit bowls and sailing ships, but here they are cut into squares, hammered out and assembled, so they only suggest the original motif.
In the artwork, they blend with other more enigmatic motifs taken from the French travel and science magazine Science et Voyage, which was one of the first travel magazines in the world.
These images, which will be printed on the brass by foil printing, are taken from publications printed in 1920 and depict strange, sleeping creatures in the Galapagos, explorers on the Greenland ice cap, ornamental tracks from a desert in Argentina, and a smoking lighthouse on a Japanese rocky island.
The travel images cultivate the idea of the wide and unexplained world, and in connection with the recognizable, kitschy world of motifs on the plates, a dialogue between the known and the unknown, the present and the mythological, arises.
In this way, the work approaches various archetypal ideas about travel: the scientific idea of the unknown as the potential for new knowledge, the souvenir collector's idea of bringing home and domesticating the foreign through objects, and the photographer's hope for travel as an unfolding and addition to the already familiar world of motifs.
With the frieze as the format, the work draws on the relief tradition's dual function as both a spatial object and an image.
This duality is intended to be emphasized by the lighting. The embossing on the surface of the reliefs is approximately 5mm deep at its deepest point, and with the right lighting, these lines dramatically stand out and make use of the same effect known from ancient Egyptian bas-reliefs.
With this reference to a thousand-year tradition of tuning space through wall decorations, the work becomes a living participant in the space. The reliefs will be softly illuminated by spotlights in the ceiling, which subtly cause the brass to emit a flickering and faint golden light into the space.
Anna Rettl – Nymphs filling the Cornucopia
My proposal for wall 1 at the Next House Copenhagen takes its starting point in Peter Paul Rubens depictions – a notoriously productive, Flemish painter, businessman and diplomat of the 17th century – of the cornucopia or horn of plenty.
The cornucopia was typically shown as a horn overflowing with harvest produce. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses for instance, nymphs fill the horn with fruits and blossoms.
As the cornucopia was a favorite contemporary metaphor and motif in the fine arts of the 17th and 18th century, Rubens painted several such horns with nymphs or Ceres, the Roman god of agriculture, surrounding it.
My composition is based on two different works of Rubens “Nymphs Filling the Cornucopia” and “Nymphs and Satyrs”.
The later shows an idyllic scene: nymphs and satyrs together in the process of collection fruits to fill the horn, which is held by two central figures. Silenus, drunkard and mentor to Dionysos on the right, is seen exiting a grotto. Pained in 1615, Rubens reworked and enlarges the work around 1635.
The painting that today hangs at the Prado in Madrid still shows traces of the underpainting. I kept both versions, equipping the figure to the right with three hands.
In line with the 1615 version, I have reduced my composition to the central figures in the foreground, who now take up the entirety of the canvas. Stripping them of all their attributes, it is no longer possible to distinguish satyr from nymph.
Without their original background and garments, it is difficult to pinpoint where in the history these figures are located. The cornucopia merely exits as a circle in the right corner of the painting. The activity and the abundance of the serene harvest gains and eerie character. Why have these characters actually chosen to come together?
My composition is split in four panels each measuring 80x200 cm and hung at a distance of approx. 13 cm. The work will be painted with watercolor on canvas.
The figures will be held in orange, blue and green and the upper part of the panels will be painted with black ink, producing a high horizon. When visiting Next House Copenhagen, I discovered that standing at a distance from wall 1, the upper half of the wall is blocked from sight by a bar.
The energy of two of the figures (on panel 2 and 4) is therefore directed upward, so that one will be enticed to approach the painting and see it in its entirety.
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