Articles and Features
Five Virtual Booths to Preview Enter Art Fair 2021
Anthony Dexter Giannelli
Enter Art Fair is an ambitious art fair located in Copenhagen – one of the world’s most vibrant and forward-looking capitals. As the only international art fair in Scandinavia, ENTER welcomes everybody to discover, experience, and acquire some of the best contemporary art, not only from the Nordic region but from around the world.
Running from 26 – 29 August 2021, the 3rd edition of Enter Art Fair welcomes more than 60 galleries and 250 artists – all approved by their international selection committee. The fair facilitates a platform that gives galleries the opportunity to present their artists to a live audience and connects the art directly with its viewer.
While keeping the artistic and professional level high, Enter Art Fair also provides a dramatic, but also welcoming, atmosphere in the raw industrial setting of ‘Tunnelfabrikken’.
Nils Stærk
This central gallery within the Copenhagen art scene offers a bold and striking presentation of work from Carlos Amorales, Michael Kvium, Mads Gamdrup, Olaf Breuning, and Gert & Uwe Tobias. When first entering the space you are confronted by the work of an artist who chooses to highlight the overlooked significance of the parts of life that we choose to hide away. In Blue Gloves, the Danish artist Michael Kvium pairs an aging female figure dressed only in latex blue gloves with a separate vignette of freshly cut trees. Here both images have strong associations with death, however, the lonely, pandemic reminiscent fate of the human woman is contrasted with the communal nature of the trees.
Across from the Kvium lies a grouping of canvases from Carlos Amorales whose bold clash between art and pop culture brings forward an introspective view of visual language with works from his series Jungla de estrellas (Star Jungle) and Bubble Mask. Unified by a mastery of novel and seemingly-dissonant color handling, Nils Stærk‘s presentation demonstrates the impactful visual presence of their artists in the virtual sphere rival the physical experience.
Galerie Dvir
Galerie Dvir examines these of reference and collation with their selection of works by Simon Fujiwara, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Jonathan Monk, Douglas Gordon, Yudith Levin, Mircea Cantor, and Sigalit Landau. You’ll notice familiar iconography within the work of British artist Jonathan Monk, who finds being original to be “almost impossible,” and instead chooses to re-examine and reinterpret contemporary art’s obsession with references.
Continuing in this sentiment of reworking popular imagery are several works from Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s Belongs to… series, acetone print transfers from an early 1960s issue of Playboy Magazine with burn marks and erasure rendering the images as both degraded archival matter and fleeting snapshots of their time. Combining these cultural references with works made of public material and scenes of public life from Yudith Levin creates an approachable environment to explore a social commentary on the current state of contemporary art.
Dio Horia
The Athens gallery, Dio Horia devotes their booth to a selection from the Greek artist Iliodora Margellos entitled Bedroom Situation (Up in the Air); a celebration of layers and psychic exploration of creation. Through found objects, textile working, stitching, and embroidery Margellos chooses an inviting, comfortingly analog language to narrate a circular story of both infancy and motherhood by developing a warm space peppered with mobiles, pillowy textures, and reflective surfaces. Complimented by the crocheted bouquets of Caroline Larsen and lamps encapsulating their own tiny worlds by Pablo Benzo, the domestic take on a new powerful meaning to an audience still freshly acquainted with lengthy at-home lockdowns.
“I also feel that during these days of coronavirus lockdowns the meaning of the room as a symbolic container has taken on newfound depths” explains Margellos, and the objects within her created container are there to help soothe emotional hurts, as seen in quilted wall hangings recalling the safety blanket she was wrapped in during infancy. This layering of textiles for Margellos takes on new meaning, evoking the layering of new skin over damage and scar tissue as “A body is meant to heal – to self-heal”.
Office Impart
In a highly effective use of space giving tribute to line work and displaying a reverence of quadradic division, Berlin gallery Office Impart presents a series of paintings by Benjamin Bernt. Bert uses a meticulous, signature style to display the stylised human figure and fictional portraiture with a simplistic representation of a side profile outline that floats atop a complex geometric plane saturated with muted colors. Whether through miniature or larger format, Bernt is able to layer a foreground and background, rivaling detail and substance to give the viewer an abundance of depth. While formulaic on the surface level, his process and willingness to surprise himself gives a varied body of work without monotony.
QB Gallery
With their solo presentation of ethereal new works from Norwegian artist Liv Tandrevold Eriksen, QB Gallery offers an inviting break from the sometimes weighty visual worlds of contemporary art. Covering white planes with long strokes and enveloping smudges of diluted diaphanous acrylic, mirroring the many fingerprints on a beloved touch screen amassed over time. Presented as a departure from her earlier works which recall her artistic beginnings in drawing from nature, instead, her forms now take on a more opaque and ambiguous structure as they become increasingly abstracted from their sources.
These visual planes divide and multiply through the hand of the artist – cut cotton cloth appliques are stitched to the surface and amplify the original canvas, sometimes distorting the orientation of the entire visual plane. Exploring Liv Tandrevold Eriksen’s tactile interpretation of the virtual plane feels uncannily at home through the VR experience, and gives the viewer an added filter that does not distract from, but in fact, complements the physical work.
Relevant sources to learn more
Enter Art Fair – Website
Explore the Virtual Fair