Peter Linde Busk: Poikilia/Rebetiko

17 Mar-20 Apr 2022

Overview

Josh Lilley is thrilled to present Poikilia/Rebetiko, Peter Linde Busk’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Six new mosaics by the Danish multidisciplinary artist will be exhibited in the upstairs rooms of the gallery, made in conjunction with longtime collaborator Katerina Kotsala. Galleries three, four, and five will play host to a troupe of free-standing ceramic sculptures, while framed reliefs and glazed tondos adorn the walls. 

A fifty page hardback publication accompanies the exhibition, with an extensive text from Maria Fabricius Hansen focusing on Linde Busk’s mosaic practice. An abbreviated version of this essay is included below.

Peter Linde Busk’s work is an entanglement of materials, methods and subject matter generated by a practice of transposition. To transpose (from Latin, “to place over” or “relocate”) usually means putting something into a different form, such as when a musical composition is transposed from one key to another. Linde Busk’s work consists of transposing old images to new ones. Interconnected in series, his work crosses over between media and materials, incorporating painting, prints, reliefs and mosaics, sculpture, ceramics, textiles and installation art.

Through the continuous translation of one work into another, Linde Busk’s artistic practice challenges the conventional cultivation of images as original entities. The 20th-century notion of avant-garde art being the creation of something previously unseen, of radically breaking with the past – is confronted head on by the artist. Instead, Linde Busk refines rather than demolishes tradition – recognising a sophisticated poetry in the repetition of forms and imagery. He invokes a recurring, highly expressive and grotesque figure – consisting of and situated within a mesh of complex ornamentation. Imagery is repeated across different works and different media, where a painting might be reinterpreted into prints, reliefs or woodcuts.

The mosaics at the heart of this exhibition are made in collaboration with Katerina Kotsala, a Greek artist with her own individual practice who participates in the symbiotic process of creating this aspect of Linde Busk’s work. Over several years, they have developed their practice in a close partnership of exchange, experimentation, adjustment and adaptation.

Contrary to Linde Busk’s other reliefs, the mosaics are composed exclusively of glass and ceramics. The pictorial components are encapsulated in grout, a grey-white ground enhancing the mosaics’ appearance of permanence. These highly inventive works synthesise dizzyingly detailed patterns, textures, colours and figurations. Figures in gaudy dress and hats, with hair and beards and strikingly big hands and feet, are embedded in abstract harlequin and zigzag patterns, spirals and circular folds. Like a landscape viewed at close range or from a great distance, the scale expands from close-ups of stylized flowers and snail shells to an aerial view of cartographic clusters of islands and countries, or a cosmos of stars seen from Earth.

Kotsala takes her point of departure from an existing work selected by Linde Busk. She assembles the mosaic in an intuitive, associative process learned and developed since their collaboration began in 2015. Transposing the image from one medium to another, she affects a reinterpretation of Linde Busk’s original work. This process of translation enables Linde Busk to mould the original subject, as conveyed in a given material (such as a painting or print), into a new form, transforming the subject and adding to the mean-ing of the work by conveying the subject’s potential in new forms. In this tension between translation and innovation, the singular creative power of the mosaic emerges.

Art can be a prism that extracts and distils aspects of how the world is perceived today and makes it comprehensible in new ways. Linde Busk’s practice has the potential to be such a prism. His transpositions hold not only great aesthetic, material and formal beauty in themselves. They also pictorialize and materialize the ongoing questioning of entrenched, self-contained, and sovereign identities of the past. Thereby, his work rep-resents an openness towards change, diversity and interconnection.

Artists