Feb. 21, 2025 → May 4, 2025
Tuesday, Wednesday: 13:00 – 18:00
Thursday: 13:00 – 20:00
Friday: 13:00 – 18:00
Saturday, Sunday: 11:00 – 18:00
Opening/vernissage:
Feb. 21, 2025, 17-21
O—Overgaden
Overgaden neden Vandet 17 1414, Copenhagen
Admission:
Free
Scraped by ursuppe
IMAGE
Victor Bengtsson
TEXT
The painterly world of Danish artist Victor Bengtsson amalgamates visual inspiration from traditional biological or anatomical illustrations and the detailed density of Flemish masters with motifs quoting Danish peasantry—think: plows, pigs, beets.
For his exhibition at O—Overgaden, Bengtsson has created a new series of works, with the centerpiece being a 6-meter-wide painting, hung unstretched and heavy. The artist’s particular technique is based on rubbing color onto hessian, impregnating motifs into the rough structure of the fabric. Leaving the threads of the yarn visible, the free-hanging colored textile alludes to historical weavings—a kind of poor man’s Gobelin. Toying with the grand storytelling of traditional tapestries, Bengtsson’s painterly motifs re-tell the minor history of rural life in Northern Europe as if seen and (mis)understood from a distant future, creating a historicization that is as much fabulation as it is factual. In the mindset of this future’s archeology, the motifs’ soft saturation in cadmium red/purple and cobalt green depict a world gone wrong, mythologizing a rural harvest in a surreal turmoil assembling oversized vegetables, an awry plow, and burning houses. The grand-scale painting is overlayed by a belt of a repeated blue animal motif, seemingly stenciled: the simplified contour of a goat-hand-gesture as a dark emblem underscores a fun, almost tongue-in-cheek or rebellious pop art and printmaking reference engrained in Bengtsson’s dyed takeover of the historic tapestry.
In another series, a set of pigs—Denmark’s number one industrially farmed animal—is sculpted in DIY origami style from painted canvas. Wonky in their remake, the pigs and their imprecision point out how (historical) translations and tales never get it quite right, destabilizing binaries of true and false. Meanwhile, Bengtsson’s painterly story continues its associative repetition of motifs in a broken frieze of paintings puzzling together dormant, or simply dead, human figures. Whether moonlighting as distorted bodies, falsified stories, or pretend tapestries, Bengtsson’s new body of work, as such, repeats apocalyptic motifs that blow apart organic or agrarian standards—which, in turn, seem to mirror the grotesque, posthuman corruptions of contemporary life.
Victor Bengtsson (b. 1997, DK) is a self-taught artist holding a BA in medicine (2019-2023) who lives and works in Copenhagen. He has exhibited at venues including Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo, 2021, New York, 2022, Brussels, 2023); Public Gallery, London (2024); East Contemporary Gallery, Milan (2021); and Someday Gallery, NYC (2024). The exhibition at O—Overgaden is Bengtsson's first institutional solo show.