TROELS CARLSEN
ATLAS
April 28–June 16, 2018
Opening: Friday, April 27, 2018, 6–9 pm
Opening Hours / Gallery Weekend 2018:
Sat, April 28: 11 am–6 pm, Sun, April 29: 11am –4 pm
Image: Troels Carlsen, ATLAS (The Conversation - Peacock/Leopard #3), 2018 (detail)
For this year's gallery weekend in Berlin, Jarmuschek + Partner is opening a solo exhibition by the Danish artist Troels Carlsen, who combines in his painted collages of ancient anatomical drawings a variety of media, visual worlds and temporal dimensions into surreal constellations of figures with an immense expressive power. Under the ambiguous title ATLAS, Troels Carlsen alludes to the exoticism and mysticism of foreign countries, to the drive to research, the curiosity and the feverish documentation of an explorer and traveler, as well as to aspects of nature, culture and mythology.
Human limbs and magnificent animal bodies converge to form morbid yet vibrant creatures in Troels Carlsen's complex new large scale works, surrounded by ornaments and vessels of foreign, distant and perhaps nearly forgotten cultures. Like in a curiosity cabinet, each pictorial element seems to have fallen from its own drawer onto the paper - yet invisibly and mysteriously connected with the others.
Everything seems real, weightless and free, at the same time meaningfully floating in a vacuum and waiting to be put together by our fantasies, stories and individual interpretations into one - or even many - whole.