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Fredrik Værslev’s Garden Paintings first appeared in 2011.
The works, which consist of wooden planks mounted on steel supports, at first look deceptively like found objects, like standard industrial pallets. Upon closer study they are obviously handcrafted, not manufactured.
The planks themselves may be industrially made, but they are mounted manually and subjected to a variety of painterly techniques. The works navigate through a post-conceptual, contemporary version of the kind of theatricality that the American art critic Michael Fried pointed to as a defining quality of Minimal art in the 1960s.
But they’re also deeply rooted in a different kind of theatricality based around a postmillennial, post-Internet focus on painting. The Garden Paintings exist both as paintings and as questions about painting.
Platting is the first institutional exhibition dedicated solely to this series from Værslev’s practice.
The exhibition will be accompanied by Fredrik Værslev: The Garden Paintings, to be published by Lenz Press, with texts by Erlend Hammer and Martha Kirszenbaum.