V1 Gallery welcomes you to an artist talk with Søren Behncke this Saturday, 21.05.16, at 2.pm. Join us in the gallery for a talk with Søren Behncke about his current exhibition La Chambre and the process leading up to it. Free admittance.
La Chambre à Arles – Van Gogh’s 1888 Masterpiece. Most artists would close the door on that room. Søren Behncke entered, deconstructing and re-painting La Chambre again and again during the course of a year. The exhibition (street level and downstairs gallery) is both the result and the documentation of the process. In 20 works on canvas, cardboard, and paper Søren Behncke engages the iconic image of the room in Arles and various artistic profiles including Philip Guston, Henri Matisse, Albert Mertz, and Roy Lichtenstein, while challenging his own craft and style of painting. He paints his way in and out of the room, transforming figurative elements – chairs, table, paintings, bed, and coatrack into a semi abstract alphabet of shapes.
The artist’s room is a classical motif for a painter. Almost a cliché but at the same time one of the most serious and honest rooms a painter can enter. A painter’s gym. Trial and error. Surely pain and sometimes triumph. Behncke is evolving in front of us, becoming a better painter, not by the act of homage, but by sparring with the masters, investigating and painting. And painting and killing darlings and painting their grave. Creating his own gestures, his own jab and dance on the canvas, his own room.
Søren Behncke (b.1967) lives and works in Copenhagen.
We look forward to seeing you.
V1 Gallery