Sofie Thorsen

We may congratulate SOFIE THORSEN on being awarded a price by the Danish Art Foundation “Statens Kunstfond” for her exhibition Skravering.

“If you look at Denmark from an aerial photo, you will quickly see that it looks more like a sharply drawn graphic than a curved wild natural landscape. Agriculture in Denmark has nothing to do with nature, but is man-made to such an extent that we in Denmark only have a few percent of so-called “wild nature”. Sofie Thorsen’s exhibition at Ringsted Galleriet is based on a Danish plow field and its long lines created by the plow when the soil is broken up. She has mimicked this kind of “shading” of the landscape on the floor inside the gallery, with long black lines across the floor, so that the entire space becomes a form of mapping with a vibrating optical effect. She uses only the floor as an exhibition surface, just as agriculture also thinks in terms of horizontal surfaces. On the black lines, there are sporadic large rolls of photos with an earthy red color on the back. The photographs come from a local archaeological excavation at a scale of 1:1, and the reddish-brown color comes from the soil itself. The scrolls are familiar from Thorsen’s oeuvre, but here they are not hung on steel tubes, but lie directly on the floor like collapsed, exhausted bodies, splattering out a little while revealing a bit of their interior, in some places supported by red spare parts for agricultural machinery, like a piece of a plow. The concrete tools are contrasted by the more historical dimension of the excavations.The well-thought-out installation, which only takes place on the floor, manages to make the entire historical room (which used to house the Agricultural Museum) vibrate. The gaze enters the room in a new way, suddenly revealing the ceiling and its many damp patches and brown markings. The graphic lines can’t keep the organic dimension completely out of the picture, fortunately.” – Statens Kunstfond