STILE
Peter Ole Rasmussen
10 May – 14 June 2024
The Eagle Gallery is delighted to announce Peter Ole Rasmussen’s solo exhibition Stile will be on show at Turps Gallery, London, from 10 May – 14 June 2024.
Stile continues Rasmussen’s investigation into the language and processes of painting. The exhibition draws on work made over the last three years and presents a series of responses to historic paintings that have held the artist’s attention. Included amongst his starting points are the small, later version of Eugene Delacroix’s ‘Lamentation over the Dead Christ’ (1857, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe) and Nicholas Poussin’s ‘Et In Arcadia, Ego’ (1638-9, Louvre, Paris). ‘Each of these historical works examines the arcs connecting life and death, success and failure, located in the religious and philosophical narratives explored by great artists he admires.’ (Sean Rainbird).
Stile – in its literal sense of steps set into a wall, or a fence acting as a bridge between separated fields – is a major motif in the recent work that acts metaphorically as an indicator of connection. Rasmussen explores his thoughts about the originals through a sequence of painterly manoeuvres. He is preoccupied with the dynamics of image, both as inspiration, and as a vehicle for transformation between different languages of figuration and abstraction. Often working in extended sequences he will use the painted surface of a canvas to print an impression of an image onto paper, altering its dynamics by changes of colour, or tonal densities. Whilst retaining the armature of the original he introduces different formal and pictorial elements.
Twelve small loosely painted canvases ‘Et in Americae Ego BD and Friends’, reference Poussin’s Arcadian shepherds transposed in a composition that incorporates the figures of the American entertainer Bobby Darin and two of his dancers in the 1950s. Across the sequence, the superimposed image of Darin, derived from a publicity photograph, shows the singer as a shooting star of the television-age music show.
Another group: ‘DVH Stile’ (i.e. ‘diagonal, vertical, horizontal’), suggests in the wordplay of the titling a relationship in the work to the modernist Dutch De Stijl movement. These abstract works on paper, canvases and more recent three-dimensional wooden forms, beyond their allusions to De Stijl, refer also to paintings by Delacroix, Tintoretto, Manet, Picasso, Poussin and de Chirico. The formal rhythms of the historical paintings are re-imagined as a series of fragile, painted, 3D structures.
A catalogue with text by Sean Rainbird will be published for the exhibition. Download pdf catalogue here.
Turps Gallery
The Chaplin Centre, Taplow House, Thurlow Street, London SE17 2DG
Opening hours during the exhibition:
Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm and by appointment
For further information please email: emmahilleagle@aol.com
or phone M +44 (0)7968 538458
