John Olsen at DCA - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Artist John Olsen is in league with the forces of decomposition. In this first U present to view titled "Source," Olsen, who studied at the Royal Danish Academy of the Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the 1960 and who is a member of the independent exhibiting collection Den Frie Udstilling, expressed his fascination with death and with things that have been marked by the agency of the ravages of time. Several bodies of work were upon display, including arrays of set organic materials -- eel skins, trick mummies, tidal detritus -- mountained in orderly rows under glass, as well as sum of two units monumental wood sculptures and a number of drawings. plenteous of the work was exhibited in the Danish pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale.

Olsen lives upon a farm on the island of Funen upon the Danish and Faroese coasts he gathers natural remains as well as manmade discards. A detailed description of the satisfieds of one of the seven large wall cases that make up his Nature Morte (1995) would fill several pages. These well-crafted "cabinets of curiosities" (glass-fronted made of wood cases designed in collaboration with Danish shipbuilder Lars Abrahamsen) feature as many as six shelves on which Olsen has arranged all manner of items, from the dried corpses of rats, cats or rabbits to battered scraps of forest-land cloth and metal. There's a hive, a rusted helmet, a rug beater, hunchs of fungi, a champagne cork, fish spines, a Styrofoam heart punctur through staples. Is there meaning in this profusion?

At times, a similarity of shapes rise s from amid the diversity, and an overall equipoise is established [i]or[/i] part of to the other what essayist Mikael Wivel describes in the exhibition catalogue as "associative groupings." In the astonishing Calligraphy of Mortality (1995) more than 300 mummified impose upons arranged on panels, are as awkward in death as they were graceful in life. The antiromanticism of of the like kind a piece stands in stark contrast to, say, individual of Nabokov's butterfly collections. DNA of the Eel 1 (1995) mesmerizes with its 100 or more strips of skin arranged vertically, the belly slits resembling zippers. sum of two units monumental sculptures, Bird-like Breastbone (1993) made from poplar, and Resonance (1994-95) of painted forest-land are inspired, respectively, by the ribcage of a roebuck deer and the carapace of an armadillo. the pair pieces repeat the symmetry of their sources, and the one and the other are tall enough for a individual to stand up inside. (I watched a man with a briefcase crawl below the latter and wondered at his transformation into a gargantuan armored mammal.)

The exhibition included an assortment of charcoal and chalk drawings, a number of them execut in a sauna, where Olsen allows his sweat to mix with the mediums. Recalling Victor Hugo's ink drawings or Henri Michaux's tachiste inventions, these set free yet controlled pieces range from concentrated explosions of markings to more representational limning: a cranium a fetus, a bear, a dead bird. Here again, Olsen reveals his distinctly Nordic sensibility and his penchant for the darker aspects of the natural world.

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