ELLEN HYLLEMOSE

Spejl spejl spejl (Mirror Mirror Mirror)

November 8 - December 21, 2024

Tekst på dansk

Click here for a pdf with installationviews and works!

In SPECTA, Ellen Hyllemose opens her solo exhibition Mirror Mirror Mirror presenting new works that may have the landscape as their starting point, but which offer us a reflection completely different from the classic landscape depictions we know from art history. Rather than a specific description of man in relation to nature, Ellen Hyllemose offer us fragments, memories, negotiations and doubts about our being in the landscape.

A larger artwork is installed on the floor of the gallery. It is placed in the space, so you can walk around it, but not cross it, like a field in the countryside. The work is based on parts of an older harrow, lying with the spikes upwards, it has been taken out of action and can seem a bit hostile with its spikes. But the rusty and hard iron is covered with lycra in a warm yellow color, and in some places the structure has been gently "repaired" with hand-pressed porcelain. In this way, it also becomes welcoming and physical. While the harrow itself can be said to reflect how the landscape has concretely been cultivated over the centuries, it is as if the lycra, color and construction of the harrow form a pattern and hold the warm memory of wavy fields on a summer's day.

The paintings in the exhibition also have a kind of trace; large, meditative paint strokes in pigment-saturated paint move calmly over large MDF boards. About the works Ellen Hyllemose herself says "(...) I would like to meet the viewer with a sensitive, positive feeling of remembrance, and associate with a color or a raw tactile feeling appealing to the body and our basic needs and desires. As when brush strokes are like a meditative act. One stroke, don't lift the brush - dripping - and another stroke next to the first one.. when it's done, I do it again, so it's several layers on top of each other, and it gives an experience of something else.. my hand and my body work and make it present to the viewer - The textile also gives associations to the body and gives a tension between materials and color (...).

The use of found objects such as the rusty harrow and beach goods, and practical and non-valuable materials such as mdf and masonite is characteristic of Ellen Hyllemose's practice. Materials we relate to and know. Put together with lycra, which embraces the other materials in bright colors, the hard and functional materials are made soft and more bodily. With its poetic title Mirror Mirror Mirror, the point is to open up to multiple interpretations. One could be that the works mirror each other, as when you think of the traces of the harrow reflected in the movement of the body in the strokes of man-sized paintings that have saw marks mirroring the strokes of paint. And back to the movement in the landscape, along the edge of the fields.

Ellen Hyllemose (DK, 1968) was educated at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She has done numerous exhibitions, most recent solo: Landscape seen from the side, Møstings Hus, Frederiksberg 2023; The Conception of a Different Landscape, SPECTA, 2020; Stone, Paper, Scissors (with Jo hummel), Fold Gallery, London; recent group exhibitions are a.o. Blue Canvas 3 at Sukkerfabrikken, Stege, 2024; CHART art fair, Copenhagen w/ SPECTA 2024, Hvert øjeblik det lige nu, Lundsgaard Estate, Kerteminde 2022, Decembristerne, Den Frie, Copenhagen, 2022. Hyllemose as done a number of public commissions, currently a large commission for a new diabetes center in Odense (DK) and among others: bl.a.: Aalborg University, Ballerup Superarena, Vestforbrændingen (incineration plant) in Glostrup and Multicenter Præstø. Ellen Hyllemose’s works are part of public collections such as SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark, Esbjerg Museum of Art, Holstebro Museum of Art, Skive Museum of Art, and the Danish Arts Agency.