Rokeby

Rokeby presents Danish artist Kathrine Ærtebjerg’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. In recent years Kathrine Ærtebjerg’s practice has questioned our identity as gendered, sexual and biological entities, offering an alterative understanding to the roles we ascribe ourselves.

The artist’s paintings and drawings have regularly presented a stateless world of in-between’s, an indecipherable land located between reality and fiction, animal and human, and in earlier instances, between puberty and adulthood. A new reality where nothing is static and nothing is certain is offered throughout Ærtebjerg’s practice where ambiguous motifs collide in enigmatic scenes that question the restraints of our everyday reality.

The new work in the exhibition On the Playground is the first series of paintings that the artist has created since Amongst the Living, The Dead and the Unborn, which, painted whilst pregnant for the first time, questioned the maternal body, and within melancholic landscapes the cycle of motherhood and ones own mortality. On the Playground presents a new feeling within the paint; the artist’s pallet has lightened, the scenes more dynamic and playful.


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Kathrine Ærtebjerg, She Never Slept, 2008
Rokeby presents Danish artist Kathrine Ærtebjerg’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. In recent years Kathrine Ærtebjerg’s practice has questioned our identity as gendered, sexual and biological entities, offering an alterative understanding to the roles we ascribe ourselves. The artist’s paintings and drawings have regularly presented a stateless world of in-between’s, an indecipherable land located between reality and fiction, animal and human, and in earlier instances, between puberty and adulthood. A new reality where nothing is static and nothing is certain is offered throughout Ærtebjerg’s practice where ambiguous motifs collide in enigmatic scenes that question the restraints of our everyday reality. The new work in the exhibition On the Playground is the first series of paintings that the artist has created since Amongst the Living, The Dead and the Unborn, which, painted whilst pregnant for the first time, questioned the maternal body, and within melancholic landscapes the cycle of motherhood and ones own mortality. On the Playground presents a new feeling within the paint; the artist’s pallet has lightened, the scenes more dynamic and playful.		As with previous work ‘She’, the female protagonist, is present throughout the work but is transformed throughout, from child to adult to simple shape or form. In constant flux there is a joyous celebration of renewal in the new paintings. Kathrine Ærtebjerg graduated from the The Royal Danish Art Academy in 2002. She has shown extensively across Denmark and her work can be found in the collection of the Danish State Museum of Art, the Arken Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum. The artist has had solo exhibitions at GI. Strand, Copenhagen, The Skovgaard Museum, Viborg and Vestsjællands Art Museum, Sorø amongst others. Her work has been exhibited in international group exhibitions at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and at Rauma Biennale Balticum, Finland. Work can be found in forthcoming exhibitions at KadE, Amersfoort, The Netherlands and at the Cairo Biennale. Ærtebjerg has been selected to produce a permanent installation at Frederik Vlll´s Mansion, Amalienborg Palace Square, Copenhagen.