Ivan Andersen - La Nuit américaine

Press release // Ivan Andersen: La Nuit américaine
21 April – 17 June 2017
Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, East wing

On Friday 21 April 2017 Galleri Bo Bjerggaard opens its fourth solo exhibition with visual artist Ivan Andersen (born 1968). The exhibition La Nuit américaine opens in the gallery's east-facing exhibition rooms and will contain eight new paintings, one relief and two sculptures.
In La Nuit américaine it appears that Ivan Andersen has simplified his visual expression; the motives are more intelligible and less complex than before. The complexity and the many stories are now displaced from the subject in the 'foreground' and are instead to be found in the material, in particular in the many layers and the process in the 'background'.
Jesper Christiansen describes this in the accompanying catalogue text as follows:
The stories now lie right behind the motifs, and you have to go right up close to the painting to see that they lie fully unfolded down in the colour technique. They may be slightly more abstract stories than we have previously witnessed, but they are nonetheless highly concrete. In this way, Ivan Andersen’s paintings suddenly become intimate, and it is like having a personal conversation with the paintings as you closely study the many layers of paint. The manner in which the layers of paint arose and were obtained is frequently obscure, as Ivan Andersen is quite unorthodox in how he applies paint to a canvas or wooden panel. Strange clashes arise between figuration and technical expressions, and suddenly, it’s clear: Ivan Andersen has not rejected ‘collage-thinking’ – he has just moved down into the colour technique and the perception of texture and nuance. The collage is expressed in brushstrokes, printed colours with plastic covering and other unhandy ways of dealing with oil and acrylic paints, because this is how Ivan Andersen creates shapes, space, time and movement – or in other words, narrative. Ivan Andersen thinks in colours and with colours. His technically equilibristic treatment of colour has always been visible, including in the earlier, collage-like paintings, but in the new works the colour treatment has been allowed to sing out clearly, as a vital and independent way to create a pictorial narrative.

Ivan Andersen was born in 1968 in Tåstrup. He graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2005 and currently lives and works in Copenhagen after several years in Berlin. Ivan Andersen’s works have been shown at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen and at the KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg. In 2015, Ivan Andersen had a larger solo show at Rønnebæksholm and in January 2018 a large solo exhibition with the artist is scheduled to open at Kunsthal NORD in Aalborg. Ivan Andersen is furthermore recognized for his larger commission works, amongst others TrygVesta and most recently at Enghave Plads in Copenhagen with his Metro-fence Vampire Mirro