Friday September 24, Hans Alf Gallery celebrates the opening of Anne Torpe's new exhibition “Linear Disruptions”.
The title of Anne Torpe’s new show refers to the interruptions, pauses and crises that the artist herself experiences when facing the canvas. Aside from this rather personal reference, the title also alludes to the concrete linear divisions that occur on the surface of Torpe’s paintings: The places in which the motif is interrupted by a change of color – and sometimes of gesture – like small pictorial disturbances or transitions on the surface of the painting that on one hand have caused the artist grief or aggravation, but which have also served as welcomed breaks in the artistic process; minute transitions from one place on the canvas to another.
Just as these ‘linear disruptions’ are visible to the beholder like a tactile rhythm on the surface of the canvas, they also exist deep within the actual motif. Torpe’s works are predominantly occupied by characters, who are waiting for something. They are trapped in a sort of ‘time-in-between-time’, as the artist herself describes it. One does not know whether they are taking a break from the hustle-bustle of everyday life, or if they have been interrupted by something or someone outside the frame. Regardless, they all seem to be undergoing a transition from one state of mind to another. In this way, Torpe’s works can both be seen as freeze-frames of everyday life, or as depictions of actual crises, which makes for a mysterious duality in her paintings: An acknowledgement of a fundamental coexistence of familiarity and unease.
Using old photographs from glamour magazines, stills from the movies of a bygone era, or even private polaroids as her primary inspiration, Torpe evokes compositions and atmospheres that seem strange and familiar at the same time. Torpe has a unique way of fusing seemingly disparate visions into an utterly new and personal imagery.
According to the artist, the works in “Linear Disruptions” can be seen as small scenes or stills from fictitious movies; random sequences of a drama, we all want to experience, but will never get to see. The audience is invited into the artist’s universe, where different characters and situations reoccur, but where an actual plot is never revealed. Older works from Torpe’s production occur on the walls behind the characters in some of the artist’s new paintings - but now presented in a different way so that new meaning emanate from them. The same applies to specific objects that reoccur across the artworks, like certain books, a board game, a colorful carpet. All these elements add to the atmosphere of the exhibition and simultaneously inscribe themselves in the ongoing image ecology of the artist’s oeuvre.
