Astrid Kruse Jensen / Marjolein Rothman

 18 augusti 2023

Among the most established visual artists in Denmark, Astrid Kruse Jensen is renowned for her dreamy photographs that blur the boundaries between memory, consciousness, reality and illusion. Specificity of time and place dissolve as the viewer is taken on an atmospheric, open-ended journey. Technical innovations allow Kruse Jensen to create photographs that question the medium itself and its reliability as a document of reality.

In her 2014-15 series Fragments of Remembrance using old negatives of her family, she dripped photographic developer directly onto the paper to create splashes of focus that loom out of the white background like snatched glimpses of history. With her ethereal series Disappearing into the Past and Within the Landscape (both 2010-12), Kruse Jensen used an old polaroid camera and expired film to introduce unpredictability into her painterly compositions, creating light-drenched images that veer between concrete and mental landscapes. This disorientation is similarly evoked in her recent razor-sharp photographs of natural scenery and domestic interiors, which present a series of reflections devoid of bearings by which to distinguish up from down or mirror from image, pointing to the duplicity of perception.

Kruse Jensen was born in 1975 and trained at The Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and the Glasgow School of Art, UK. She has exhibited extensively in Europe, as well as in America, China and India.

Her works are represented in several collections such as The National Museum for Photography, Denmark, The George Eastman House, Rochester, USA, Artotheque de Caen, France, Manchester City Gallery, UK and at AROS, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark.

She lives and works in Copenhagen. Marjolein Rothman’s powerfully suggestive works are an inquiry into the nature of perception. Often fashioned in series, her portraits, and paintings of architectural monuments and buildings, are geometrically shaped, fragmentary, and rendered with minimal depth in a spare, sober palette.

Devoid of the compositional detail that conventionally directs the viewer’s interpretation, Rothman’s portraits and scenes of people capture mood and feeling through posture or gesture. Evidence of her early training as a photographer, her images seem to loom out of and disappear into their ground, frozen in a state of becoming like photographs forming in a dark room. Her bleached out paintings on canvas or aluminium, based on photos, comprise a series of rapid brushstrokes that are repeatedly wiped away and redone in her search for the image’s essence, which often lends the works an ephemeral character as if they are present and not present at the same time.

Recently her attention has turned to flowers, incorporating brighter colours in a profound engagement with painting itself and the tradition of the still life. Through a process of reduction and obfuscation, Rothman’s images deconstruct the stability of historical truth, and invite viewers to explore the illusory aspects of knowledge itself. Rothman was born in 1974 in Eibergen, The Netherlands. Rothman received her education at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten, Enschede, The Netherlands, 1994-1999 and was an Artist in Residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, 2003-2004.

She has been awarded The Royal Prize for Painting, 2004 and the Buning Brongersprijzen, 2004. She lives and works in Amsterdam.