Bricks Gallery is pleased to present Verdant Fade, a solo exhibition by Jon Erik Nyholm, with an opening reception on Friday June 7th from 5 - 8 PM. This marks the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery featuring oil paintings and ceramic sculptures.
‘We are compost, not posthuman’
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016)
For his new exhibition at Bricks Gallery, Jon Erik Nyholm presents a constructed landscape. Paintings of hazy and dreamlike snapshots embrace the walls as portals into other worlds. The paintings complement slender ceramic sculptures that punctuate the gallery space, like blades of grass perforating a concrete road.
The new paintings are of various sizes, ranging from a panoramic serial piece stretched across the wall, to large formats mimicking windows facing a garden, with smaller works luring the viewer in for a peek. The palette is soft, ranging from pale blue, old rose, burnt orange, murky yellow and brown, suddenly disrupted by turquoise, green and purple.
The landscape is abstract, though the paintings reveal just a few recognisable figures, like flowers emerging from the surface of the canvas, maybe dissolving, maybe bursting into bloom. A pile of rotting leaves evokes a sense of vanitas, pointing to the impermanence of life, as well as the eternal cycle of regeneration through the process of composting.
A handful of ceramic sculptures stand freely between floor and ceiling, choreographing a pathway through the space. Their surfaces shift from glossy, colourful, oxide glaze to raw burnt clay. They manifest as a disruption in the landscape, physically pointing to the sky and the ground at once.
Nyholm’s recent work with ceramics reads as a practice of de-composting his family heritage – the practices of his grandfather, artist Erik Nyholm, and his aunt, artist Katrine Nyholm – as well as that of art history in general. The work becomes a nurturing of family ties, like a remoulding of generational entanglements, and a motion towards a collective practice, as he works side by side with his aunt in the ceramics workshop, learning from her knowledge of working with clay.
Inspired by nature and natural phenomena, Jon Erik Nyholm creates his artwork through a long intuitive process where layers upon layers of thin oil pigments, and the careful shaping of clay, bring forth a merged image juxtaposing his environment and lineage with his internal emotional topography.
- Text by Maria Kamilla Larsen
Jon Erik Nyholm (b. 1982) is a Danish artist who lives and works in Copenhagen (DK). Nyholm holds an MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (DK). Recent exhibitions include ‘Det Nære Det Sære Det Smukke Det Store’ at 1.SAL.100 (2024, Copenhagen, DK), ‘THIS LAND’ at Bricks Gallery (2022, Copenhagen, DK), and ‘Dear Hunter’ at LIST (2019, Copenhagen, DK).
