BRAND NEW GALLERY
presents
ALEXANDER TOVBORG
Giverny
1 March - 4 April 2012
Opening: 1 March | 19.00-21.00
'It was only when Eve and the young stranger had exhausted the Kama Sutra (was that last position Splitting the Bamboo, or the Congress of the Cow?) that she realized what it was she really wanted. As the guard came running over the Japanese bridge, the beam of his flashlight stabbing wildly at the undergrowth, she took the stranger by the hand, helped him down from the lily pad, and began to wade with him through the still waters of the pond towards the house. She had been in the garden for only a few short hours, but she felt that it was somehow part of her, as though it had grown, in all its florid majesty, from the shadowy cleft between her legs. Eve tapped her fingertips against the damp triangle of her pubic hair. It yielded fast and firm, like keys on a computer keyboard; bouncing back up the moment she released the pressure. They were almost at the house now. On the other side of the pond, the guard blundered and swore through the warm Normandy night.' (excerpt from the essay by Tom Morton in the catalogue)
Brand New Gallery is pleased to present Giverny, the first solo exhibition in Italy by the young Danish artist, Alexander Tovborg.
Sophisticated narratives embedded within a fervid and oftentimes metaphysical imaginarium, Tovborg’s work straddles abstraction and figuration, drawing its power from a miscellany of foreign cultures, literary stimuli and religious spirituality. It is layered and complex, in some ways mystical, and takes form through visual experiments whose content and concept investigate and challenge artistic, historical and religious traditions while, at the same time, playing with the viewer’s imagination. Confidently deploying a range of media, from painting to sculpture and linocut, the artist constructs a fictional erotic narrative for Giverny, set in the famous garden of Claude Monet. The Milan exhibition also features a series entitled Tourist, in which Tovborg situates archetypal and symbolic figures that function as points of interaction between an erotic/artistic reading of the Kama Sutra and the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Tovborg expresses himself through intense and colorful storytelling, elegantly Scandinavian and folkloristic in its representation, meditative in the poetic geometry of its settings. While always acute and full of life, his work sometimes negates color, censors it, resulting in intimate spaces that inspire silence and contemplation. These spiritual spaces constantly evoke the religious theme so important to the artist, insofar as it is the ideal position from which to observe man’s devotion in an intensely private dimension.
Alexander Tovborg was born in Copenhagen in 1983, and graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in 2010. From 2007 to 2009 he attended the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, Germany. His work has been shown in internationally renowned museums and galleries. He currently lives and works between Copenhagen and Berlin.
Catalogue
Published by Brand New Gallery
Text by Tom Morton
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