Artist: John Kørner

Patricia Low Contemporary presents an exhibition of new paintings by Danish multidisciplinary artist John Kørner.

Made expressly for the exhibition, and corresponding to the Alpine location of the gallery, the paintings are exclusively of mountain landscapes. Melding abstraction and figuration, and working from a combination of memory and photographs, the new works picture glaciers flowing between mountains heaped on top of one another in alluring colours and compositions. Kørner, whose lushly painted and seductive canvases interrogate systems of exchange and consumption through seemingly innocuous items like pre-packaged fruit or sneakers, focuses on mountains as containers for contemporary issues, not least climate change.

As such, water is the proper subject of the paintings, and the melting of the glaciers is reflected in Kørner’s technique of pouring water on flat painted canvases and leaving it to run the course from top to bottom, forging these glacial landscapes with their particular sense of movement and dynamism. Colour is used to evoke rather than concretely establish a location: yellows, oranges, and deep greens in Murano glass shades offset the brutal white of the mountain world, making it glint. The result is dreamlike, ringing with beauty but cut, too, with unease.

John Kørner

Born 1967 in Århus, Denmark Lives and works in Copenhagen

He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen between 1992 and 1998 and has exhibited extensively in his hometown since, including at the Danish Architecture Centre (2021), Kastrupgårdsamlingen (2015), The Workers’ Museum (2011), and KBH Kunsthal (2005), among many others. He is represented by Victoria Miro in London, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard in Copenhagen, and Keteleer Gallery in Antwerp. Recent exhibitions include Tongue Out at Galleri Bo Bjerggaard in 2023 and Cosmopolitan Super Fruits at Victoria Miro in 2022. In 2021, he held his first US solo museum show, Intercontinental Super Fruits, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. His work is held in notable collections around the world, including those of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA, and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), French National Art Collection, France.