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Tan Lines

Fredrik Værslev - Tan Lines
This catalogue presents the artist's Sail Paintings series—32 hybrid compositions reminiscent of a boat's sail. This monumental publication (30 x 40 cm) is designed as a graphic extension to the project.
Fredrik Værslev's work has always been about expanding the possibilities and the field of painting through the interlacing of technical experimentation and conceptual framing. Tan Lines aims to do the same: to represent an artistic practice in the form of a book.
Displayed at three venues from 2017 to 2018, each of the thirty-two works from the series Sail Paintings is presented here. Værslev's work brings together a wide range of elements, including nautical symbols, stripes, vividly painted or silkscreened colors, oil drips from the studio floor, art-historical and autobiographical references co-inhabiting the surface of each piece. In this book, Værslev has placed transparent designs across every page, adding more forms onto the already multilayered paintings, which are composed of painted canvasses folded and sewn together into triangles. This gesture, imbuing the works with even more puzzle-like symbolism, represents yet another step in a practice that is based on constant research and experimentation with, but also within, his works.
Accompanying the monumental reproductions in this book are two essays, by Giovanni Carmine and Michelle Cotton, which deconstruct the paintings' iconography and process, and an interview with the artist by Adrienne Drake.
Published following the eponymous touring exhibition at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, from November 11, 2017, to January 14, 2018; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, from February 3 to April 1, 2018, and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, from October 13, to December 22, 2018.
Fredrik Værslev (born 1979 in Moss, Norway, lives and works in Drøbak, Norway) studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt and at the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. He is the director and founder of the Landings Project Space in Vestfossen, Norway. He exhibited in numerous museums and institutions worldwide.
One of the most original voices of contemporary painting, Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev navigates between different painterly traditions. His practice demonstrates an insistent focus on the painting process that demonstrates the possibilities and relevance of the medium today. His works stem from the meeting between architecture and painting, and take form as painted renderings of motifs from the artist's daily life. He treats his paintings as objects, often created through more or less laborious, serial, or deterministic processes where time itself, as well as various external factors, become active co-creators in the making of the piece. In several series he left his paintings outdoors for long periods of time, allowing the weather and external wear to complete them. Other works employ apparently clichéd techniques, motifs, or art historical quotations (i.e. dripping and splattering). Værslev also challenges the process of painting by freely collaborating with fellow artists or making use of untraditional painting tools, such as spray cans or equipment used to paint roads and sports arenas. Værslev's paintings often shift between abstraction and representation, as can be seen in his breakthrough series, the “terrazzo” paintings, that imitate the visuality of Italian stone floors and at the same time call upon the expressivity and spontaneity of abstract expressionism. The “Canopy” series is reminiscent of modernism and its stripe paintings, but they stem rather from the awnings at the artist's childhood home.
Edited by Giovanni Carmine.
Texts by Giovanni Carmine and Michelle Cotton, interview with Fredrik Værslev by Adrienne Drake.

Graphic design: PIN (Samuel Bänziger, Rosario Florio, Larissa Kasper).

 
published in January 2020
English edition
30 x 40 cm (softcover with dust jacket)
72 pages (36 color ill.)
 
35.00
 
ISBN : 978-3-956794-30-8
EAN : 9783956794308
 
in stock
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