IBEN TOFT NØRGÅRD

Imploding Images, Charlotte Fogh Gallery, 1/3-30/03 2019.  
In 'Imploding Images' Iben Toft Nørgård exposes the boundaries as she transgresses them. Illustrations are deconstructed and paper is examined as a carrier of information. The pieces contain a slow and meticulous conversation between the artist and the paper, concerning unison and motion in an image that collapses into itself.

An auto-anthropological piece of sorts, with the title 'Decennium', is central to the exhibition. The piece consists of margins that Nørgård has cut out and collected over the last 10 years from the material she uses in her work. The point of departure of the pieces in the exhibition is exactly that: The cut-off. 'Imploding Images' is an artistic experiment where all pictorial material is removed, and only the cut-offs remain with a narrow contour from the cut-away picture as a line in a new. With this experiment Nørgård has reworked new material for the series of pieces un-ostentatiously titled 'White'. This body of work explores what can be said with the cut-off, the gap, the hole, and tells about learning to feel at home in the trembling tension of the in-between. 

Nørgård has sought to deconstruct her well-known language, asking questions to the paper, listening to the material - to the mistakes. Through this circular extrication of control, one work has morphologically shaped itself out of the other. Splitting has been a specific take on challenging symmetry while still retaining a few tremors and shimmers from the source material to emphasise the subtle colour differences in the contours. The white cut-offs have been layered in height which raises the pictures sculpturally, and in the distances between these layers innumerable tones of grey form in the shadows.

Through a number of years Nørgård has critically examined the human structuring of nature in illustrative encyclopedias. These art pieces are masterfully executed three-dimensional collages using colourful flora- and fauna plates as source material. She uses this as a focal point for an, almost hidden, disintegration of the systems as a silent resistance against them. This way she has worked with creating an illusion only to reveal it herself. Through the recognisable she invalidates authenticity to show a connection and a unity between human, animal, plant and landscape.

With 'Imploding Images' Nørgård invites us to examine the seemingly blank paper more closely. The natural movement and self-organising forces in the paper has been given space in the pieces; The organic plant fibers pull the joints, and unpredictable arches and waves form through fixation of the layers. The strengths and fragilities of the material dramatise a narrative about the relationship between picture and meaning as being complex and unstable. The fundamental basis of the art pieces are tiny little units that at first sight are insignificant, and through them patterns and processes of far more profound reach are established. Where the shape of each cut-off actually can be recognised by careful inspection, it is assembled to an abstract scale.
[Text by Carina Lin Sixten]