On Friday March 6, we celebrate the opening of Anders SCRMN Meisner's new show "Angel". The exhibition is the Danish painter's fifth with Hans Alf Gallery since joining the stable in 2012.
After the success of his last exhibition “Modern Love”, which marked a defining transition from paper to canvas, Anders SCRMN Meisner is back with 16 new, evocative oil paintings in a show he’s called “Angel”. The works in the show are predominantly blue, an enigmatic mountain ridge is repeated, and in most of his almost scenographic tableaus, the stars and the moon take center stage. You sense that everything is held together by a peculiar, nightlike calm, which trickles like water underneath the frames.
SCRMN explains:
“Back in June 2019, I stayed in an old vicarage in a small village a few hours south of Lyon. Every night, we slept underneath the stars in the master bedroom, where the ceiling had been transformed into an indigo firmament covered in hundreds of fiery stars. In the following months, I didn't really think too much about this experience, but one day, standing in my studio, I realized that suddenly all my paintings were blue and full of stars. The vicar’s night sky had travelled back to Denmark with me.”
“The strongest inspiration often happens subconsciously – and often only reveals itself much later. There are many patterns in my paintings, specific colors and recurring figures that I have picked up along the way, and which are now integral parts of my vocabulary. Things from my time in Sevilla, from Amsterdam or from my wife’s beloved Colombia. Together these things form a very personal iconography; a visual memory without which I probably wouldn’t be able to paint.”
“Although the works in “Angel” seem to revolve around the religious experience as a theme, the exhibition is not to be considered religious. Instead, “Angel” is about hope, forgiveness and redemption in a world, where were almost being suffocated by Humanity’s biggest and heaviest questions: What am I doing to fight climate change? How am I taking care of the planet? How will I protect my family in case of war? All of this responsibility, all of these grave concerns: We need absolution, spiritual relief, an angel that soars down from above and redeems us. Especially in a time, where the divine seems to have abandoned us.”
