STICKY EYES (paintings, collages, drawings, and monuments)

The tides of loss and its onerous repetition—daily, weekly, annually—flow through Morten Knudsen’s painterly practice.

In the series of works E is for Everything, E—the first letter of his son’s name and also the name of the antibody that ended up taking the son’s life—recurs throughout. Somehow scoring and rationalizing both the life and the unbearable, the black-and- white series of serene, minimal letters roughly cut from blackout curtains (collages) or carefully penciled on canvas (drawings) works as mantra or meditation, giving shape to the formation and loss of meaning.

In the exhibition’s larger space, we encounter Knudsen’s floral landscape paintings whose thick impasto surfaces, deep-hued colors, and a hint of fin de siècle might at first read as romantic, nostalgic. Yet they quickly reveal themselves as surging viruses: dirty, gnarly, uncontainable, and invasive. Much like the repeated use of foamboards and plastics, their synthetic palette—in part iridescently unnatural pink, magenta, and red—creates an antidote to their impressionist or pointillist origins. In one black and grey piece, the artist repeats and distills the paintings’ omnipresent spots, imprinting a constant pounding—an almost aggressive penetration—into the canvas.

Knudsen typically leaves an area of his canvas untouched or sparsely occupied. The painterly composition and empty spaces thus become motifs in themselves, evoking his son’s life and the aftermath—the paralysis and exhaustion of grief. Knudsen reworks this condition in his ongoing spiral series, Six Days and Six Nights, ritually reiterating the coiling symbol. A new, grey piece picks up on O—Overgaden’s floor color, repeating the circular motif as part of these processual works which Knudsen also refers to as monuments.