Alt Forladt
View exhibited artworks:
A solo exhibition with Stense Andrea Lind-Valdan
Galleri Maria Friis is pleased to invite you to the opening of Alt forladt (Bygones Goodbye), the second solo exhibition by Stense Andrea Lind-Valdan in the gallery. The exhibition features paintings on canvas and cotton paper, alongside a selection of photographic works. The works explore themes of lost dreams, grief, and silent struggles. The exhibition is accompanied by a poem by Stense Andrea Lind-Valdan.
There is violence in these paintings – balancing between the figurative and the abstract. In some works animals are in labor, but the births have gone wrong. A mother turns to face her newborn, but it is just an unrecognizable liquid streaming from her belly. Coiling Medusa’s snakes echoing the twisting arms of an octopus are both erotic, unsettling, strange and ancient. What is a woman, what is an animal, a mother, a monster?
In Danish Alt forladt is a common phrase which figuratively speaking means “all is forgiven”. In a more literal reading it means “all is left behind”. Interested in this ambivalent doubleness Lind-Valdan works with the phrase in both ways. Working around deliverance through pain, towards forgiveness, recovering from physical and emotional hurt.
I keep my finger on the pulse
for more than a minute
till I am gone
disappear on my own accord
Like bruising blue
feeling
my heart beating
hard
on the wound,
this is how I open.
My face, My neck
exuding tears
hard like stone
the fruit I bear,
eat and throw up
spreading my scream
falling
from Heaven.
Then I die
in rhythmic waves
losing the battle,
falling on the Field of woes
I let go and
bid bygones goodbye
my darling.
Stense Andrea Lind-Valdan (b. 1985, Denmark) is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Her works are part of the collections of the National Photo Collection, SMK and the Danish Arts Foundation, among others. In addition to her artistic practice, Stense Andrea Lind-Valdan also contributes to national and international art discussions in her work as a writer and art critic for the leading Nordic journal of contemporary art, Kunstkritikk.no.
_
Cover image:
Stense Andrea Lind-Valdan, Valen 1-6, 2023, Acrylic on paper.
Photo: David Stjernholm