Invincible Summer

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“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back.” – Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, 1968.

Through the years Galerie Mikael Andersen has held numerous group shows during the summer period, often inviting artist to organize the summer show. This year, the exhibition draws inspiration from the quote by Albert Camus. The idea of an ‘invincible summer’ refers to notions of brightness, joy and colour, whilst also evoking a melancholy that came before.

Invincible Summer shows seven very different artists who all, to some extent, work within classical mediums of painting and sculpture, while also interpreting the human figure. These are joyful, unapologetic art works that deal with the human condition. However, the feeling of invincibility is almost inevitably followed by a sense of fragility. After all, nothing is in fact invincible.

Some of the artists – Catherine Anholt, Derek Fordjour and Louis Fratino – explicitly engage with classical art history in their dealing with the human figure as motive, while Jon Pilkington, Lucy Teasdale and Josef Bull all walk the line between abstraction and figuration, each in their own distinct way. With her motives of depopulated spaces Eleanor Ray stand out from the rest. Nevertheless, her empty interiors feel heavy with the presence of a figure – as if someone just left, or, like a stage set where a scene is about to take place.