press release
bjarne werner sørensen
soft collisions
june 1 – july 26, 2024
reception: saturday, june 1, 12-6 pm
Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to present soft collisions, an exhibition of paintings by artist Bjarne Werner Sørensen. This is the artist's second exhibition with the gallery and is accompanied by a fully illustrated 32-page catalog with an essay by Danish artist and writer Erik Steffensen.
The exhibition features a series of new oil paintings. All have been created since the turn of the year. The paintings were begun in Copenhagen, where the artist is based, and then completed in New York City, where he currently resides in a studio residency at the Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts.
Bjarne Werner Sørensen is not only a painter but also a printmaker. His work consists primarily of paintings and prints that explore abstract formalist painting traditions that emphasize movement and contrast with gesturally applied color and form to create energetic compositions. As his printmaking has expanded over the past two decades to include digital technology, he has rediscovered and expanded his view of printmaking. And then he has brought his experience to painting, which is about layers of color and movement of forms on the surface. Bjarne Werner Sørensen has thus made the connection between the possibilities of the digital space and the sensitive craftsmanship that has characterized his painting, which more or less throughout his career has been related to abstraction and nature, where the organic weave of the image is allowed to unfold on the canvas.
In Bjarne Werner Sørensen's art, a rigorous and disciplined expression is revealed through testing the substance and material of painting. His art relates to what is, to what emerges and develops within the possibilities of the format. Perhaps his experience with printmaking has led him to work through his art in serial processes; at least in these recent paintings, one can trace a kind of structure that holds the organic and the experienced within the same vertical format. Paintings with titles such as Tide, Stream, and Wind clearly speak of natural phenomena that, through the painterly and luminous use of color, have become focused investigations within a fixed framework.
Bjarne Werner Sørensen has painted for most of his life. He was born in Denmark in 1960 and lives and works in Copenhagen. In 1985 he graduated from the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark. Even though the organic substance he releases onto the canvas appears Nordic and dramatic on the outside, the nature of his work is not only Nordic. There is a taste of the world that has a complexity beyond graphic simplicity. He grew up in Syria, Lebanon and then north of Copenhagen. And he spent a good part of his formative years shuttling back and forth between Faroe Islands where his mother was born (an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway) and Copenhagen where his father was born, and has made the country-city duality of this aspect of his life a defining motif of his art. His parents moved from Denmark to Iran in 1975 where their son would visit them. In 1979 they returned to their homeland before moving to Thailand, where they lived from 1982 to 1986, and he spent six months in Thailand in spring 1986. He has exhibited widely in the U.S., Denmark and abroad. He has been in artist-residencies in Helsinki, Paris, Bergen, Iceland, Berlin and New York. His numerous residencies and exhibitions in New York City since 1997 have been particularly significant, and the new paintings in this exhibition were created during his current residency in the International Artist Program of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA). He is a recipient of several grants and awards and his work is represented in numerous public collections and institutions, including The National Gallery of Denmark and The New Carlsberg Foundation.
The Gallery is located at 529 West 20th Street, 6th floor, and is open Tuesday through Saturday 12 – 6 pm. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Saturday, June 1st, from 12-6 pm. In July the gallery will be open summer hours that are Tuesday through Friday 12 – 6 pm.
For further information contact Miles Manning at 212 463-9666.