Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is pleased to present the first New York solo show of Danish artist Thomas Ovlisen. The show will feature paintings and sculpture using auto-lacquer and enamel on MDF and Styrofoam.
Ovlisen’s process mimics that of auto-body shops; his visual inspiration is derived mainly from weathered cars, the worn down layers of lacquer revealing the forces of nature on its utmost adversary. Beyond this, however, the paintings may be also seen as abstract landscapes. Layer after layer is applied, sanded down, and built up until a kind of emotional memory is satisfied, evoking the layers that weather and time generate on natural landscapes through the spans of geological epochs.
The sculptures grew from the paintings, but are also informed by Formes formentarius (better known as Tinder or hoof fungus,) a fungal growth living in a destructive parasitic relationship with trees. In creating the sculptures using a techniques similar to those used to make the paintings, Ovlisen is able to produce both a weathered feeling and a sense of history. They have marks that shows a lifetime of battering and disease, and whose relationship to the effects of man on a post-industrial landscape are therefore more imminent than ancillary.