Spatial Collage
Karen Bennicke (DK)
12 January – 18 February 2023
Architecture is Karen Bennicke’s primary source of inspiration. This perspective lends her works a strong spatial character, with light and shadow as key actors in a sort of intuitive mathematical construction of thematically connected serial sculptures. She operates in a field in between something distinct and recognizable and something vaguely defined that emerges in a space with harmonious as well as chaotic aspects. With this, she attempts to suspend the distinction between the logical and tangible universe of form that we are familiar with from our daily lives and a realm that is illogical, unfamiliar and absurd.
The largest object in the exhibition, the monumental Geometrical Composition from 2019, emerged as a paraphrase of a plan by the French-Japanese architect Bernard Tschumi. Bennicke blew up a selected detail from this plan and inflated it to create a three-dimensional form. Big, heavy and brutalist, its clear layering brings a strong dynamic quality to the expression.
Over the past couple of years, Bennicke has based her work on a building by the French architect and sculptor Georges Adilon, a special-needs school built in 1976 in La Verpillière, France. The interesting aspect of this work of architecture is the interaction between four staggered bombastic elements that form the central core and express both gravity and interference. This core is under attack from a delicate, almost insect-like asymmetrical system of stairs, an interpretation Bennicke has transferred to her own visual expression. The series, which Bennicke has titled Spatial Collage, so far includes thirteen sculptures. The exhibition at Peach Corner presents the five most recent additions, a collection of tangible spatial forms that provide access to utopian mental spaces and visions.
Karen Bennicke (b. 1943, Denmark). Lives and works in Bregentved near the Danish town of Haslev. Trained as a potter in 1958–1961. She has had her own studio since 1961. In 1972 she established a shared studio with writer and ceramic artist Peder Rasmussen in Copenhagen, since 1974 in the town of Bregentved. Bennicke has held numerous exhibitions both in Denmark and abroad and is represented in a several museums, including Designmuseum Danmark, Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Museé des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She has received many grants and awards including the life-long honorary grant from the Danish Arts Foundation in 2016 and the Thorvald Bindesbøll Medal in 2017.
