AS WE TURN FLUENT
KRISTIAN TOUBORG + TOVE STORCH
PREVIEW BY APPT 09.10.21 | 12PM – 6PM
OPENING 9.11.21 | 12PM – 6PM
ON VIEW UNTIL 10.23.21
CARVALHO PARK is delighted to announce the first exhibition of Copenhagen-based artists Kristian Touborg and Tove Storch in the United States. Swiftly ascendent in the Danish contemporary art sphere, Touborg and Storch are here introduced with new, notable works of painting and sculpture for their New York debut. Curated by Henriette Noermark, As We Turn Fluent, may be previewed on Friday, September 10, by appointment, ahead of the opening on Saturday, September 11, 12PM – 6PM at CARVALHO PARK.
The act of construction is one that relies largely on the ability to balance between acting forces and effects. While the constructed quality of language is often emphasized through the lens of fluency, to frame ideas of communication in terms of architectural process and industrial sensibility is much less common. Danish artists Tove Storch and Kristian Touborg have each developed signature aesthetic vocabularies that foreground ideas of artificial construction. Their respective sculptural and painting practices balance between moments of tension and collapse, and a sense of immutable structural support against the mechanics of fluidity. For this exhibition, Storch and Touborg found a shared rhythm that introduces us to suspended movements, surface tensions, and illusions of forcing nature in certain directions. Through spatial strategies that elicit emotional engagement, both Storch and Touborg use textiles to communicate newly poetic ways of understanding this relationship.
Invested in the idea that spatial experience is inarticulate, Storch explores how materials, process and movement can elucidate a different understanding of our position in the world than that which can be attained through language. She explores how the physical properties of different materials can be pushed or tested, become almost unrecognizable or misbehave in provocative and unexpected ways. Her two new sculptural works operate according to this logic of disguise. Untitled (gold) and Untitled (yellow) consist of sheets of silk fabric that have been laid across a framework of steel legs, anchored at various intervals by placing small magnets on top. The structures are reminiscent of topological landscape models with ball-bearing-sized humans for scale, rolling bodies of water frozen in motion, or tables in their height and planar arrangement. Storch’s works often toy with our conditioned perceptual schema and lets us be aware of our surroundings; her contribution to this exhibition is no exception.
With titles such as Energy Pond, Dawn Sequence and Turning Fluent, Touborg moves fluently between nature and the city, the digital universe and contemporary painting. Working within a particularly haptic mode of representation, Touborg’s stretched canvases feel just as much like spatial interventions as two-dimensional painted images, oscillating from volumetric transparencies to graphic opacity. Various fragments of recycled fabrics, reflective industrial textiles and swatches of digitally printed canvas are collaged together through a method of hand-sewing. Often featuring details from previous works, crops from art-historical imagery, and architectural photographs taken whilst walking around his neighborhood, these digitally printed sections collapse a sense of time, location and definitive authorship across his paintings. After being stretched over structurally altered aluminum bars, these ruptured and fragmentary base-layers are then overpainted with expressive mark-making. The patina of industrial decay is evoked alongside the mysterious allure of glimpsed water surfaces. The cumulative effect is one that harnesses the spatial logic of the finite human body to offer a new framework through which to approach contemporary painting. This logic insists on a flattened hierarchy of visual impressions and on a simultaneous, rather than chronological, approach to plotting individuals, events and actions.
Storch views her sculptural forms as an instigation of natural forces, rather than as a product of her own will alone. Artificial elements are arranged in a way that allows gravity or magnetism to visibly act upon them. In Untitled (gold) and Untitled (yellow), the raised peaks in the fabrics’ surfaces, deliberately determined by the artist’s placement of magnetic anchors, are just as important as the troughs that the weight of gravity lulls into place. In response to a fundamental awareness of the limitations of the finite human body, Storch identifies her willingness and ability to harness external forces to serve her artistic purpose as a basic feminist strategy. While binary constructions of the chaotic natural world versus the ordered realm of manufacturing are often tacitly endowed with gendered bias, Storch collapses these categories as she exposes artificial material to natural influence. Appropriating the bare and sterile aesthetics of Minimalism and loading them with both sensation and the threat of collapse, Storch presents a new conceptual paradigm that revels in the tension and fluidity of oppositely acting forces and material states.
Also drawn to redefine the way we understand the ordering principles of nature, Touborg evokes rhizomatic growth patterns and other “natural algorithms” in his paintings to illustrate the slippages that exist between the natural world and the digital sphere. Touborg approaches composition in a way that foregrounds repeating units. Beam-like structures, orbs and colour fields sprout up across Touborg’s pictorial planes in sequence. At the heart of his appropriation of digital concepts and use of computer-based imaging tools is an interest in how digital technologies mediate affect. As our relationships become increasingly reliant on the facilitation of screen-based communication, Touborg examines new possibilities for the emotional experience that digital technologies make possible and proposes how the visual language of contemporary art might be inflected to accommodate this new form of experience.
In many respects Storch and Touborg’s shared interest in the possibilities of communicative construction is fueled by an ongoing negotiation between function and expression: how can the properties of diverse materials be distorted to suggest new ways of understanding our environment and lived experience? How can familiar tools, both conceptual and mechanical, be repurposed according to the language of contemporary art? While Storch and Touborg approach these questions differently, As We Turn Fluent foregrounds the points of conversation between their work and the important role that illustrative forces and motion-based-learning might play as we jointly pursue collective and reciprocal understanding.
– Henriette Noermark
Tove Storch (b. 1981) is a Copenhagen-based sculptor whose artistic project can be viewed as a continuous investigation of material possibilities. Her works challenges the viewer’s perception of space and reality and ask questions to what sculpture is and what it is able to do. In a combination of a tight minimal expression and delicate, fragile materials her works give physical shape to complex reflections on form, time and space.
Storch received her MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007 with exchange placements at Akademi der Bildende Künst (Vienna, AT) from 2003-2004 and Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (Berlin, DE) from 2005-2006. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Louisiana (Humlebæk, DK), S.M.A.K (Ghent, BE) The Phillips Collection (Washington, USA), Malmö Museum of Modern Art (Malmö, SE) and HEART - Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Herning, DK).
Recent exhibitions include: ØJNENE (solo) at Politikens Forhal (Copenhagen, DK; 2021), ØJET (solo) at Huset for Kunst & Design (Hostelbro, DK; 2021), Apple Romance (solo) at Nils Stærk (Copenhagen, DK; 2020), Accessory Muscles (group) at various sites (Copenhagen, DK; 2020) and The Collection (I) : Highlights for a Future, 20th Anniversary Exhibition (group) at S.M.A.K (Ghent, BE; 2019).
Kristian Touborg (b. 1987) is a Copenhagen-based painter who combines classical technique with digital tools to explore ideas relating to figuration and abstraction, originality and reproduction and the new possibilities for artistic subjectivity that the age of algorithmic intelligence presents. Foregrounding the importance of craft methodology whilst simultaneously embracing the potentiality of industrial fabrication, Touborg’s works interrogate the space for emotional expression within the sphere of technological development.
Touborg received his MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2016. His work is included in the permanent collections of HEART - Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Herning, DK), Randers Kunstmuseum (Randers, DK) and the Danish Arts Foundation (Copenhagen, DK).
Recent exhibitions include: Socle Du Monde Biennale: Welcome Back My Freinds to the Show that Never Ends (group) at HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Herning, DK; 2021), Wild Blue Yonder (group) at Newchild Gallery (Antwerp, BE; 2021), Brigade Archives #1 (group) at Brigade (Copenhagen, DK; 2021), Accrochage (group) at Galerie Mikael Andersen (Copenhagen, DK; 2021) and Balancing Time Between Your Eyes (solo) at Galerie Mikael Andersen (Copenhagen, DK; 2020).
Henriette Noermark (b. 1984) is an independent Copenhagen-based curator and writer whose curatorial practice is concerned around the connection between the physical, bodily connection between the viewer, the work and the given architectural surroundings. Working transdisciplinary between the fields of art, design and crafts in both her exhibition and writing practices, Noermark aspires to invite the viewer or reader inside the minds of the artists.
Recent exhibitions include: Sculpture to Sculpture at The Round Tower (Copenhagen; DK, 2021), In a Slow Manner at Le Bicolore – Maison du Danemark (Paris; FR, 2021), Jordbunden during Aarhus Art Weekend (Aarhus; DK, 2020), On Balance at Tableau (Copenhagen; DK, 2020), In Dialogue at Fredericia Furniture (Copenhagen; DK, 2019), Touch & Relate at Christoffer Egelund (Copenhagen; DK, 2019), Weathered at Mark Kenley Domino Tan Showroom (Copenhagen; DK, 2019), Don’t Know What Shape I’m in at Patrick Parrish Gallery (New York; US, 2018), The Cosmic Wall at Spring/Break Art Show (New York; US, 2018) and If It’s a Chair in at Patrick Parrish Gallery (New York; US, 2016). In addition, she curated the first CURIO at Chart Art Fair, Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, DK) and the art programme, Heartland Temporary, for Heartland Festival (Egeskov Slot, DK). She is a contributor to TL Magazine, Oak - The Nordic Journal, Elle Decoration, RUM, Design Anthology, Metropolis, Trouvé, Journal du Thé, The Weekender among others.