Astrid Kruse Jensen Places Beyond Places
Join us for the vernissage on Friday, May 9, at 17:00-19:00
Astrid Kruse Jensen is engaged in the essence of spaces and places, not only as something that surrounds us, but as something that arises and shapes us, as a state of being, a construct between perception and remembrance. The physical spaces captured in the works blend with the infinite structures of memory – coming into being and being shaped through this interaction.
In the exhibition, the different places and spaces are woven together across time and place. In the works, Astrid Kruse Jensen enables the traces within the places to emerge, as fragments of their stories and ongoing meanings. The places exist as both pockets of time as well as thresholds for dreams, longing, inspiration, memory and interpretation. These former personal spheres, as condensed reflections, become universal openings in the photographic surface that resonate states and existential timbre in an eternal now.
In the works, absence and presence blend together, and past and present are balanced in the movement, in the shadows and the blurring of the backlight. In the balance between disappearance and appearance, cracks arise that destabilize the immediately recognizable and open up a space that is continuously emerging. The works are in a liminal state, where time, material and perception shift and open up new perspectives on what seemed familiar at first.
In her photographic works, the starting point is a material that is itself subject to the changeability of time: Expired Polaroid film. The works not only fuse motif and material but also allow past and present to be merged on the same surface. Astrid Kruse Jensen’s photographic method is closely connected with her interest in our perception – and not least memory as a construct, which is an important driving force for the artist, who has worked with memory as a form of displaced reality throughout her oeuvre.
Karen Blixen’s home in Rungsted is one of the artist homes featured in this exhibition, and at the Karen Blixen Museum, Astrid Kruse Jensen is currently showing the photographic installation, Den Flygtige Time (April 17 – September 14, 2025). On May 22, she will open the solo exhibition Traces Of A New Beginning at Viborg Kunsthal (May 22 – September 7, 2025).
The exhibition Places Beyond Places contains new works from 2024 – 2025, originating from various artist homes from Rungsted, across Funen to Skagen. These works will form the seed for further exploration of places like these.
Astrid Kruse Jensen (b. 1975) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands and at the Glasgow School of Art. She has received the Niels Wessel Bagges Kunstfond in 2008, the Arken Travel Grant in 2014 and the Anne Marie Telmányi Prize for Women Artists in 2017. She has had solo exhibitions in Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland and India, as well as several group exhibitions in Europe as well as the USA, Canada and China. Astrid Kruse Jensen’s works are represented in several private and public collections, including ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, the National Photo Collection, the Danish Art Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation, Hafnarborg Institute of Culture and Fine Art, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, Artotheque de Caen, The John Kobal Foundation, Manchester City Gallery, The George Eastman House, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.