Quarantine Works #1

New works by Marianne Therese Grønnow and Dorte Jelstrup. August 26 - August 30, 2020. Julius Valentiners Vej 22, st., 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark.

The exhibition Quarantine Works #1 has the experience of today's Covid-19 pandemic as a thematic focal point and shows new works by Marianne Therese Grønnow and Dorte Jelstrup.

Quarantine Works #1 is held at a special location, namely in a former room for psychological consultation in Frederiksberg, Denmark; the room is more or less emptied so that the artworks constitute the main artifacts of the site. The artistic intention of this choice of location is to facilitate an encounter between the audience and the artworks that emphasize the states of consciousness associated with the experience of going through a pandemic. The works by Grønnow and Jelstrup breathe new and different life into this unconventional location, and at the same time the site sets a framework for the artworks that points in the direction of the artistic experience as psychologically integrative and healing.

Quarantine Works #1

Visual artists have historically thematized pandemics. A striking example of this is the European artists' pictorial representations of and reflections on the Plague from the mid-14th century and onward. Visual art's approaches to pandemics have been diverse over the years. The Plague has been seen as a warning of punishment for committed sin, in their works visual artists have emphasized empathy with the suffering victims of pandemics, and especially modern artists have created self-portraits in an attempt to counter the destructive ravages of the pandemic by giving a response that highlights an individual agency despite the encounter with vulnerability, fragility, illness and the far too close presence of death.

The exhibition Quarantine Works #1 has the experience of today's Covid-19 pandemic as a thematic focal point and shows brand new works by two of Denmark's most prominent women artists, namely Marianne Therese Grønnow and Dorte Jelstrup. All the works in the exhibition Quarantine Works #1 have been created during the Covid-19 situation. These are works that are semantically open for the audience to mirror their own experiences and emotions as well as thoughts related to what it means to live and be a human being during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Held at a special location: A former room for psychological consultation

The exhibition Quarantine Works #1 is held at a special location, namely in a former room for psychological consultation in Frederiksberg, Denmark; the room is more or less emptied so that the artworks constitute the main artifacts of the site. The artistic intention of this choice of location is to facilitate an encounter between the audience and the artworks that emphasize the states of consciousness associated with the experience of going through a pandemic. The works by Grønnow and Jelstrup breathe new and different life into this unconventional location, and at the same time the site sets a framework for the artworks that points in the direction of the artistic experience as psychologically integrative and healing.

As such, Quarantine Works #1 is intended to be broad in it's scope understood in the sense that most of us in this time in one way or another have had and still have experiences, emotions and thoughts related to the Covid-19 pandemic just as our living circumstances have been affected in various ways by the Covid-19 situation.

The exhibition Quarantine Works #1 gives the audience in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the summer of 2020 an opportunity to see newly created works that speak directly into a field of experience that is the audience's own. And at the same time, the exhibition connects to the historical pictorial explorations of earlier times of what it means to live and be a human being during a pandemic.

Marianne Therese Grønnow shows new drawings and paintings

Marianne Therese Grønnow shows new drawings and paintings at Quarantine Works #1. The drawings, created with pencil on paper, present themselves to the viewer as intimate probings of everyday objects that connect to life in a lockdown situation. The drawings show a bottle of homemade hand desinfectant, a book (Ulysses by James Joyces), empty wine bottles, a sugar bowl and detergent - objects that are given in the immediate life within the four walls of the home. Grønnow also shows a larger painting whose surface is painted with gold and rainbow-like colors that represent the visible spectrum.

The ground of the painting is created from older works that have been cut up, and points in this way back to a lockdown situation, where the artist is referred to creating out of the material that is already at hand in the studio. The painting's gold surface casts a light back on the viewer, just as the rainbow-like colors' reference to the light spectrum puts light as the painting's basic thematic focal point in a negating contrast to the darkness that the pandemic and its experience bring with it. But also in an emphasis that art can respond to the pandemic situation by a materialization of new light-filled hopes, just as the art experience can be the healing force that indicates a way out of the pandemic darkness.

Dorte Jelstrup shows new drawings with gouache

Dorte Jelstrup shows new pen and ink drawings with gouache on paper at Quarantine Works #1. The works, entitled From the Twilight Zone (Self-portrait/During the Covid-19 Pandemic) and From the Twilight Zone (Male Nude with Roses/During the Covid-19 Pandemic), are self-portraits and depictions of the masculine Other. The drawings narrate psychologically and in a pictorial form the experience of existing in an imaginary transition zone between life and death and day and night - a zone with a basic impulse reflecting the pandemic reality that death is near and a latent, present possibility.

This zone, the Twilight Zone, from which Jelstrup's drawings are derived, can also be interpretatively seen as a subjective consciousness, expressed as an inner container for soul-disturbing and anxious mental states related to the death that the pandemic brings with it. The works appear both optically alluring by their purple, violet, magenta and orange-red colors that glow on the white paper, but at the same time also unreal, other-worldly and eerie.

A part of a new experimental program: Opal Spaces: Artists / Location

Quarantine Works #1 is produced as a collaboration between Opal Spaces, Marianne Therese Grønnow and Dorte Jelstrup and is presented as a part of Opal Spaces: Artists / Location, which is a new experimental program that couples artists with an unconventional location. Opal Spaces: Artists / Location aims to allow the participating artists to create location-responsive exhibitions in a weighting of the participating artists' freedom and autonomy to install and present their works in accordance with their own creative imagination and ideas.

For inquiries please contact: contact@opalspaces.com