ASGER DYBVAD LARSEN | TRANSFORMED IN TRANSLATION

Galerie Rolando Anselmi is delighted to present Transformed in Translation, the first solo show by Danish artist Asger Dybvad Larsen in its space in Berlin. Larsen works mainly on the physicality of the painting and on the transformation of traditional paintings materials. His works are both painterly and highly tactile and are identified most clearly in their dialectical conversation with the medium's traditions and its classical structure. For this exhibition Asger Dybval Larsen concentrates in the transformation that happens when you press a painting, covered with wet paint, against another painting. In his Paint tray paintings, he investigates surfaces and focuses on motif, material, processes and themes. An acrylic paint-cast of a paint tray surface structure is attached on a canvas and acts as an abstract motif in the work, 
referring back to the precursors and the basic materials of traditional painting. This particular process focuses on the physicality of the painting and includes a stage of the process in the surface of the artwork itself. Asger Dybvad Larsen's paintings are well determined by a dialectical relation to tautology and autonomy, with a continuous reference to themes and traditions of post-war art. This includes a reference to Ad Reinhardt and his text: “Art as Art”, where repetition and autonomy are essential and the personal sign of the individual gesture is rejected in favor of an art that tries to achieve a form that does not refer to anything other than itself. Larsen relates to this tradition but at the same time creatively breaks, through unexpected interventions, with the postmodern accession towards painting and the conventions of 20th-century abstraction. In his Pressure of paint tray paintings, the transformation from a paint tray painting to a print of the paint tray casts, adds a complementary layer of meta-process to his work. The artist uses this ultimate gesture as further investigation into the medium and as a tool to create a theoretical framework that challenges the dialogue of the traditional understanding of painting.