Isabel Sullivan Gallery is pleased to present One More Beach Rose Please, an exhibition of recent paintings by Danish artist Anders Scrmn Meisner, on view from September 7 through September 28. We are delighted to announce this exhibition marking the inauguration of the gallery’s new back exhibition space, The Artists’ Room. This space will be dedicated to smaller bodies of work, site specific installations, or utilized as a space for artists to explore new ideas or collaborations.
Consisting of 10, new small-scale paintings created specifically for the gallery, One More Beach Rose Please is an ode to summer and its ephemeral and intoxicating energy. The inimitable rhythm of celebration, revelry and melancholy that begin, crescendo and finally falter throughout the course of the three fleeting months of summer are explored in each of the works included. Meisner presents that which we have experienced, that which we will soon long for, and that which we know will come again.
The exhibition’s title refers to the copious amount of Beach Rose bushes located near the artist’s house by the Kattegat Sea, off the Northeast coast of Denmark, whose petals begin to languidly fall in August, and beckon autumn’s arrival. This period of change is also marked by the tall grass that has begun to turn yellow and the once plump, green grapes that have started their chromatic metamorphosis into deep, lush reds. Retreating to his summerhouse in the Danish countryside for the season, all of these earthly changes surrounded the artist for the preceding months, and filled him with a myriad of ever evolving, poignant emotions and observations. As he notes, “it’s the strangest thing, when you notice the evenings getting darker, just about the time when you had begun to take the light in the summer evenings for granted.”
Viewed together, the paintings form a mosaic of summer moments. Ranging from a still life of flowers plucked from the artist’s garden, to a choir joining together in a sun salutation, to twin boats and passengers gliding under a luminous moon, and finally to pointillistic explorations that are simultaneously abstract, highly concentrated and visually explicit. Their dimensional uniformity creates a sensation of sculptural objecthood, further emphasized by the artist’s inclusion of titles, written vertically on the thick, box-like sides of the canvases – titles that announce themselves, like narrative epithets. The paintings function as totems, as Meisner depicts lived experiences suspended in time, lulling the viewer into a dream, or perhaps a memory; ones that we wish to stay in forever, but we know we can never fully grasp.
Anders Scrmn Meisner was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1981, and is a self-taught artist. Meisner has had solo exhibitions at the following galleries: Hans Alf Gallery, Copenhagen, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, Art Drome, Valence, France, AJG Contemporary, Sevilla, Spain, and Lotsremark Projekte, Basel, Switzerland. Meisner lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.
