Anders Brinch’s exhibition “Dawn” consists of a new series of paintings, in which we are invited on a Dionysian voyage with Death as our companion through grainy landscapes at dawn, where night becomes day.

We are presented with classic Brinch motifs, like the neorealist bar scene with skeletons playing billiards and washed-up aliens, drinking themselves further and further into morning oblivion. But we also find references to American cinema and to the bible, as we’re suddenly having dinner with Adam and Eve both dressed as Death in the Garden of Eden. Or when we’re teleported back in time thousands of years, where two cavemen are roasting a mammoth, they killed – or even millions of years; to the time where dinosaurs roamed.

The paintings are kept in warm, grainy nuances that emulate the flickering state of non-existence that characterizes dawn, and the individual motifs are visual metaphors for the inevitable transformation and change in the unending cycle of life. According to the artist, the works are to be seen as small, poetic and melancholic memento mori: “Remember – you have to die!”

And so, we remember this, but as we move about in the dim light of Anders Brinch’s personal dawn, in the slight gap between night and day, among aliens, dinosaurs, and intoxicated skeletons, the realization somehow doesn’t seem that cruel. Rarely has death been so magnificent.