For his inaugural project at the gallery, Fredrik Vaerslev’s Groundhog Day is comprised of two landscape paintings: a large-scale diptych and a light work. Vernacularly named as “canopy” and “light bulb” paintings they represent two examples of series for which Vaerselv is particularly known.
The process with which the large monochromatic painting is made ties the artist’s practice to not to his home of Norway, but also to a uniquely tactile type of non-painting. The painting, a diptych, is first primed with pigment-tinted acrylic primer, folded, and finally left outside for several weeks to dry on the roof of the artist’s studio – it presents a surface that is visibly changed, filled with gestures and marks, but is the result of this “natural” collaboration with variance and contingency in its process. The second painting is comprised of a sheet of glass that is layered with spray paint that is then pushed and moved with a windshield ice-scraper and then set in front of a light bulb. It is a luminous display - its reference being a small painting that the artist’s uncle once owned. Though altogether visually muted as a simple surface, once the bulb is (and was in the original) illuminated, there is an odd magic that is activated that is about not about craft but its own attitude.
Fredrik Værslev was born in 1979 in Moss, Norway. He studied at Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Künste, Städelschule, Frankfurt and Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. He currently lives and works in Drøbak and Vestfossen. He is Director and founder of Landings Project Space, Vestfossen, Norway.
Recent and upcoming group shows include: Modern Institiute, Glasgow; Flex-Sil Reloaded, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St. Gallen; Lunds Konsthall, Lund; Awaiting Immenence, Isbrytaren, Stockholm; Lies about Painting, Moderna Museet, Malmö; A Human Interval, Circus, Berlin; Fruits de la Passion, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Collaborations & Interventions, Kunsthalle Andratx, Mallorca; Priority moments, Herald St, London; Le Printemps de Septembre, The Museum les Abbatoirs & Croix Baragnon, Toulouse.