Exhibition period: November 13, 2011 – January 8, 2012
Cuban artist Odey Curbelo presents Deep Field, a solo exhibition at Skive Museum of Art exploring landscape painting, cultural identity and the potential of painting as a contemporary artistic language.
Odey Curbelo will be present at Skive Museum of Art from November 8, 2011, and the exhibition will be open to the press from November 10, 2011.
For more information, press images or interview appointments, please contact curator Tijana Mišković at mail@tijanamiskovic.com.
About the Exhibition
In Deep Field, Odey Curbelo invites the spectator into a contemplative room of mental landscapes realised through the classical language of painting. Landscape painting as a tradition, with all the references and connotations it instinctively awakens in us, forms the backdrop on which Curbelo paints.
The paintings seem familiar at first sight. We have seen them before; they represent places that exist in our collective consciousness, fastened to the canvas by a succession of Danish painters. But what is actually at stake in these paintings?
Going deeper into the pictures, they seem to cancel out their own concretisation of the landscape. On the edge between the recognisable and the unreal, they suddenly appear strange, even uncanny. The paintings seem to demand the spectator’s own answers to questions that can only be reached through deeper contemplation. It is this challenge to the spectator, with its subsequent reward, that the exhibition title Deep Field refers to.
Landscape, Identity and the Stranger
The stranger. The artist’s own position is central to this alienation of the known. As a Cuban artist who works and lives in Denmark, Curbelo stands outside looking in. His landscapes are not, like those of the Danish painters of the Golden Age, an investigative and venerating view of the domestic, but rather an appropriation of the unknown.
Through his landscape paintings, Curbelo is painting himself into the Danish. Thus, the pictures question the national once again: who owns that which is “Danish”?
The Potential of Painting
The potential of painting. More than any other artistic medium, painting allows for the visibility of the creative process and the veneration of the medium itself. By insisting on the techniques of classical painting, Curbelo places his works within a long tradition, drawing strong references to art history.
Here, an appropriation is also being undertaken, fostering something different and alien to the tradition from which his works derive. By shifting between different painting techniques and approaches, the pictures seem timeless — they are not of one era. Each approach has been carefully considered and chosen to conjure a particular atmosphere. Thus, Curbelo fully exploits what is specific to this medium: the potential of painting.
The Artist’s Curation
The artist’s curation. Curbelo’s choice of motifs and framework of reference is characterised by an open mind and a broad visual curiosity that collates motifs across cultures, periods and concepts. To illustrate this ongoing dialogue, the museum’s collection will also be enlisted in Curbelo’s solo exhibition.
This will happen through a curatorial approach in which Curbelo selects works from the collection of Skive Museum of Art and recontextualises them in relation to each other and to his own works. Thus, the audience is invited to see something new in already known, older works, and to see something familiar in Curbelo’s new paintings.
Exhibition Catalogue and Interview
Read the Deep Field exhibition catalogue .
Read the interview with Odey Curbelo at Kunsten.nu .
Exhibition Views
Earlier Solo Shows by Odey Curbelo
TERRENA — 2009, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales / Havana’s Historic Center, Cuba
MASTER OF HUNT — 2008, Christoffer Egelund Gallery
About Odey Curbelo
Odey Curbelo was born in 1976 in Cienfuegos, Cuba.
Education: Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, Cuba, and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Selected solo exhibitions: TERRENA — Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba, 2009; Master of Hunt — Christoffer Egelund Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2008; Paintings — Minuit Vernissage, Grand Theatre, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2007.
Selected group exhibitions: Bomba — Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana, Cuba, 2010; Last Temptation — Co-Lab, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2010; Plastilina — Centro Iberoamericano de Cultura, Havana, Cuba, 2008; The Artists’ Fall Exhibition — Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2007.
In addition, Curbelo received a residency at Accademia di Danimarca in Rome and has collaborated with Düsseldorf Academy of Arts and The Iceland Academy of the Arts, Reykjavík.
Support
Deep Field is supported by the Danish Arts Council’s Visual Arts Committee, Museum Salling, Tijana Mišković, Gross. L.F. Foghts Fund, Augustinus Fonden and Chilensk Vinimport.