New Horizons
Henrik Godsk
Opening reception: Thursday 29 August, 6-8PM
PIERMARQ* is pleased to present New Horizons, an exhibition of new work by Danish artist, Henrik Godsk from 29 August - 29 September 2024.
Henrik Godsk (b. 1975, Hjørring) is of seventh generation travelling heritage, having grown up among his family’s roving fair in Denmark and Norway. His practice reflects pride in his upbringing and cultural identity, fusing folkloric and high art to create portraits that are directly reminiscent of the accentuated designs of the fairground.
Progressing from solely figurative subjects towards more complex compositions, the works in New Horizons meld landscape, still life and portraiture traditions. Playing with the conventions of art history, Godsk offers a refreshing take on figure painting through the lens of his cultural upbringing on the land and his love of twentieth-century modernism.
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Henrik Godsk is not just another modernist. The Danish painter often cites the cubists for helping to contextualise his painterly perspective, namely Pablo Picasso and Amadeo Modigliani, and there is a clear lineage of late 19th century and early 20th century painting into which Godsk has inserted himself. Yet to maintain Godsk exclusively in a legacy of modernism is to miss the unique extra-temporal quality of his work.
As Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes in his work Hyperculture, our cross-cultural spheres now collide to offer us the chance to become synchronised beyond simple classification. Han suggests that our globalised, digital lifestyles allow for art to hybridise and hyphenate in ways that were previously impossible. Godsk’s painting, born from his upbringing in (literally) carnivalesque, nomadic fair culture and moulded by modernism as well as the slings and arrows of the contemporary art world, exemplifies Han’s hypercultural theory. He straddles the icons of medieval Christendom, the portraiture of the 20th century cubists, and the homepages of 1990s computer games. Despite the regimented and stylistically canonised system that Godsk has created for himself as an artist to this point, the modernism that anchors his work does not hinder its subtle, playful disruptions. Godsk’s work is not a simple reclamation of cubism’s use of disparate shapes. It is a mosaic of influences, qualities, and histories. Godsk is a painter out of time and therefore critical to documenting our present moment.
In the past, Godsk has described his portraits as vessels – laboratories for his exploration of form and colour. His seemingly humble, geometric style that he has developed serves as a zone of experimentation. Like constantly reconfiguring a Rubik’s Cube, Godsk’s practice contains an ever-growing collection of formulae for his recurring shapes, colours, and forms to be used for personal reflection. This compilation of symbiotic multitudes within a single framework can be connected back to Godsk’s connection to travelling fair culture.
Raised in one of the largest carnival and circus families in Scandinavia, throughout his youth, Godsk travelled in the summers around Northern Europe with the fair alongside his entire extended family, all of whom have kept the business and tradition alive since the 18th century. Godsk’s paintings are vessels in the way that the travelling fair is a structural constant, its existence inherently linked to flux. Just as its site moves from place to place, culture to culture, community to community, so too do the mechanics of the fair become shaped by the fluidity of constant travel. These mechanics are not merely the rides, kiosks, and equipment, but the people who facilitate them. It is in Godsk’s traveller origins that Han’s hypercultural lens can be most directly applied. Times, places, and experiences converse through windows within windows. In works like Blue Sky we see how his portraits are still, but the minutiae—from the specific texture of each brushstroke to the complementary shapes and their contrasting colours—are in a state of constant, symbiotic exchange.
Winters as a traveller were foundational for young Godsk. Under his father’s and grandfather’s tutelage he spent the off-season renovating fairground attractions and painting the panels and façades on the rides. Yet beyond learning the family trade, these preparatory winters would plant the creative seeds that would awaken, as with the fair, come spring. Godsk has spoken of how his family apprenticeship first introduced him to colour mixing and honed his skills and precision with a paintbrush The geometric reconfigurations of folkloric and Scandinavian subjects and landscapes appear as a direct allusion to this formative part of his identity. In many ways, Godsk’s enchanting, recurring figure, often sitting on the precipice of an open vista, reads like a cubist reimagining of the forlorn protagonists in Hans Christian Andersen stories and Edvard Munch paintings. The deconstructed figures, repeatedly staged by windows, take an alternative approach to the yearning for something outside—something different and new. Here the painting is again a fairground. The inside and outside are linked through time and space. The new horizon is perpetual.
One need not look much further for evidence of the openness of Godsk’s style than in the playfulness with which he paints. The New Horizons series sees Godsk make colour choices bolder than his usual primary palette. A carefully mixed, attractively muted pink plays a starring role, especially in works like Pink Horizon and Pink River. Establishing an advancement of his technique into new territory, Godsk uses pink in In Bloom to blur the distinction between person and place, present and future. The figure is on a precipice waiting for their springtime. As stoic as the neat linework may appear, Godsk’s interplay with bare canvas, imperfect curves, and unfinished sections provides us with far more room for personal interpretation and contemplation. Though working with traditional materials in this way Godsk emulates not a modernist aesthetic sensibility, but a post-internet one. Godsk left the fair life in his twenties, settling into urban art communities amidst the boom of technology in the 1990s. His work bridges the primitivist and geometric inspirations of the modernists with the aesthetics of the early digital era. While not pixelated like Serbian painter Maja Djordjevic, nor digitally rendered like Hong Kong animator Wong Ping, Godsk’s scenes join a chorus of unique international artists whose experimentation with two-dimensional interpretation, presents us with uniquely post-digital understandings of space, and our relationships to the people and objects placed in them.
Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, similarly renowned for “Superflat” paintings, writes extensively about the agency of interpretation that flatness provides to the viewer’s eye. A painting layered not by physical dimension, but emotional and thematic complexity, allows for each experience with it to be new, guided by our vision and that which we bring to our viewer’s gaze. Godsk, knowingly or unknowingly, follows Murakami’s theory in his depth of field. The way in which we digest his scenes usurps traditional portraiture. It is here that we are reminded of his intended links to modernists Picasso and Modigliani. In works like Green Forest and The Lake we are enticed into solving the puzzle of the form each time we lay eyes upon his recurring, pleasant-yet-mysterious androgynous figures. These figures become like the rides, challenges, and performers at the fair—attractions of spectacle with the possibility of something new every time.
Yes, Godsk is a modernist in that he has created a structure through which to conjure his scenes. Everything is impressively deliberate in the construction of the work, from each colour choice to where and how much a line is left unfinished or unrefined. However the scenes eventually presented to us, driven by his nomadic upbringing in an ever-changing, ever-globalising internet age, is also highly “nonmodern,” to use French philosopher Bruno Latour’s term. Truly each canvas forms a window—a controlled looking glass into possibility and self-reflection. The consistent presence of windows looking upon further pastures in works like Pink Horizon and his smaller “Forest” works exemplify this understanding of painting as a vantage point to something beyond the frame of the canvas. Each Godsk painting, like the fair, contains something that defies its own parameters and invites us to explore not only the main spectacle, but also the new possibilities that happen between each act, between each performance, between each night, between each town, between each country, between each life.
Gregory Uzelac is an artist and curator, and a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sydney University. He is based in New York and Sydney.
