Next Thursday, August 29th, the inaugural edition of ENTER art fair opens to both VIP and public alike in a spectacular custom built tent in the progressive development district of Refshaleøen, close to the historic heart of Copenhagen. Unique as the Nordics only international contemporary art fair, ENTER welcomes 30 galleries from around the world. Here we meet a selection of the participants and learn of their plans for the fair.

Christian Larsen was founded in 1996 in Stockholm, Sweden. Over the last two decades, the gallery has built a reputation for its dedication to artists and to presenting a dynamic and rigorous exhibition programme of both emerging and established artists from Scandinavia and internationally. Over this time the gallery has fostered close and cooperative relationships with museums and curators in both Scandinavia and worldwide. The gallery has forged an ambitious program of exhibitions featuring artists as eminent and diverse as Sally Mann, Louise Lawler, Ross Bleckner, and with a new generation of Swedish artists such as Joakim Ojanen, Mårten Medbo, Anton Alvarez, Ann-Sofi Sidén, Matti Kallioinen and Max Book. Many of the renowned international artists have been brought for exposition in Sweden for the first time. Recent highlights of the program include exhibitions by Frank Bowling, Gavin Turk, Robert Mangold, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Samore, Horst P. Horst, Rose Wylie and John Körner. In the summer of 2018 Christian Larsen opened a second space in Falsterbo in Skåne, Sweden. In Autumn 2019 the gallery will relocate to Sturegatan 28 in the city centre of Stockholm.

For ENTER the gallery will present emerging art star Joakim Ojanen’s first exhibition in Copenhagen, featuring a new series of sculptures, paintings and drawings. In this exhibition Ojanen continues the evolution of his diverse array of endearing and surreal characters, creating sculptural and pictorial scenes where his cast of oddballs and misfits are released from isolation and increasingly begin to interact with one another. Manoeuvring around the exhibition these figures and creatures appear in conversation, seemingly unaware of how they got there and unsure about where the path may lead next. But the sense of melancholy and unease that is laced throughout Ojanen’s practice does not take over; instead the tragicomic characters that inhabit his playful world demonstrate a determination and desire to press forward, to overcome.

Working in both clay, bronze and in a new development for this exhibition, plasticine, Ojanen’s sculptures are intuitive in their making. Starting with the shape of the head, Ojanen gradually begins to prise each character’s features from the material, building and experimenting until a unique, individual personality and voice is brought to the fore. A seemingly never-ending array of peculiar noses, eyes and mouths are used that, little by little, evolve in ever-more surreal directions. Ears can function like arms, cheeks begin to stretch and flop, full human lips morph into duckbills and elongated noses sprout from their faces creating an imaginary world where anything seems possible. Ojanen’s drawings develop in much the same intuitive organic way as his sculptural works, with the artist using charcoal and pastel as a medium for this exhibition and applying colour to these for the first time.

Ojanen’s enigmatic and playful work thrives on the carefully crafted balance between childlike innocence and melancholy, with his ever increasing and diverse cast of multifaceted characters displaying the full spectrum of complicated human emotion.

dépendance was founded in late 2003 by Michael Callies, regarding itself as more than a commercial space, and more as a venue and attitude sharing its artists’ critical views.

Since the very beginning, dépendance introduced young artists to Brussels when they were relatively unknown, many of whom are still now affiliated with the gallery; dépendance held the first international exhibitions for artists such as Sergej Jensen (2003), Haegue Yang (2004), Michaela Eichwald (2005), Jana Euler (2010) and Peter Wächtler (2013). Thomas Bayrle, Michael Krebber, Richard Aldrich and Ed Atkins have all shown in Belgium for the first time with dépendance. The gallery tries to strike a balance between emerging and more established artists, recognising the conceptual rigour of all as a key thread between them. In order to open up more possibilities for artistic creation, the gallery expanded in September 2014, now operating out of an enlarged premises in central Brussels. For the ENTER art fair, the first time the gallery has participated in a Scandinavian fair, dépendance will present a selection of existing and new works by gallery artists: Richard Aldrich, Ed Atkins, Will Benedict, Thilo Heinzmann, Sergej Jensen, Linder, Henrik Olesen and Haegue Yang. They elect to exhibit, side by side, artists of different generations; the presentation being a cross-section of dépendance’s portfolio, and intended as a statement of purpose.

Platform A is presenting a variety of approaches to drawing through the work of three artists. Each has a dedication to practice that has developed skills to the highest standard. From Richard Forster’s ‘photocopyrealist’ works; meticulous graphite representations that reference abstract compositions, Tony Charles’ ‘Unpaintings’ that deconstruct painting using a drawing action through an industrial process applied to aluminium panels, to the machine drawings of Nick Kennedy where the hand is absent from the process and mechanization replaces it, the concept of the booth simply explores the notion and scope of drawing and how it can reference, confront and merge with painting and sculpture. Forster’s concerns with a global/local relationship, Charles’ investigation of industry and objecthood, and Kennedy’s exploration of order and chance pose deeper, individual, questions to do with a sense of place; concerns that have been amalgamated here through art’s most primal genre.

Tony Charles’ background involves the experience of working in the steel construction industry which continues to underpin his practice through the use of industrial process, material and concept. His investigation into drawing centres around the deconstruction of painting, with the relationship between brushstrokes and grind marks on aluminium exploring notions of drawing, object-hood and erasure.

Nick Kennedy’s work follows a path of experimentation with a practice that spans drawing, sculpture, installation and performance. His ‘experiments’ often deliberately parody scientific process to reflect a fascination with the hidden nature of things, time and materials. He seeks order in a chaotic world, recasting chance and unpredictability as his tools. In recent projects, Kennedy has distanced himself from the act of making through the introduction of delicate drawing devices and close collaboration with participants to realise works that explore the boundaries of drawing.

Richard Forster makes drawings in sequences. A key starting point for his practice is a documentary approach to time, process and sense of place. Forster has nurtured his drawing from formative years he describes as an ‘anxious teenager alienated in an English suburban bedroom’. While his intimate and compulsive attention to detail could be categorised and mistaken for photo-realism, Forster prefers to use more ambiguous categories such as the ‘nearly-photo-realistic’ or the ‘photocopy-realistic’, in an attempt to extend the reading of the work towards the meanings inherent to the medium of drawing, and the particular subject-matter of his choosing.