Adam Jeppesen Adam Jeppesen

It is with pride that Martin Asbæk Gallery can present the solo exhibition of the Danish artist Adam Jeppesen which opens on Friday 22 September 2017. In the present exhibition Jeppesen has been preoccupied with the awareness that everything breaks down at some point, after which something new is created. This is a natural part of our world which is inevitable – whether we like it or not.
Photography David Stjernholm

The works exhibited belong to the series ‘The Pond’. In his work Jeppesen has been fascinated by the decomposition process in ponds and how they form part of the natural environment. The pond represents a process in nature that is not affected by human beings: an unruly, wild environment that takes care of itself and will not be controlled. As an extension of this theme Jeppesen has created a number of glass tanks in which cloth is stretched in the middle of the tank, after which the various tanks have been filled with a clear liquid. The stretched piece of cloth starts to float inside the tank and creates references to another element in the exhibition – a study of hands that have been transferred from negatives to linen using the cyanotype process. The hands are separated from their bodies and thus also create a floating illusion like the cloth in the tanks.

The glass tanks in the exhibition show a distortion of perspective which gives rise to questions and a sense of wonder about what we are actually looking at. What is hiding there in the darkness? We do not always have to explain everything; sometimes it is a matter of letting our visual sense guide us and perhaps lead us to an understanding. In the expression of the tanks a duality arise that arouses discomfort but at the same time seduces us. The lovely material which both floats and is stretched out and confined is alluring and in a way beautifully melancholy. This melancholy and beautiful solitude is recognizable from Jeppesen’s earlier work with landscape photography.

Most people probably know Adam Jeppesen’s work through the series The Flatlands Camp Project, in which in the course of 487 days he travelled from the Arctic, on through North and South America, to the Antarctic. From this long journey came a series of melancholy, atmospheric landscape images which have been exhibited in among other places the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen.

While Jeppesen worked more personally with his own experiences and impressions in The Flatlands Camp Project, in this new exhibition he launches a new approach in which a more uni¬versal concept of the beautiful and the imperfect in human existence takes central place.

Adam Jeppesen (b. 1978, Kalundborg). Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jeppesen graduated from the Danish school of photographic visual art Fatamorgana, Copenhagen, in 2002. He has exhibited at The National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen, C/O Berlin in Germany, FOAM in Amsterdam, Scandinavia House in New York, and many other places.