Rose Eken: CAN

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Rose Eken’s new exhibition takes its departure in a group of paint cans. Not just any cans – Jackson Pollock’s paint cans. Eken found a vintage photo of the infamous American artist’s studio and created a group of 22 ceramic objects in the work Homage A Pollock in 2015. The motif kept haunting Eken and she returned to it in the spring of 2016 where she began to make tinsel paintings – reverse paintings on glass with applied crumbled metallic foil – of the image, deconstructing and reconstructing the tableau over and over again.
The result is CAN – a suite of 16 new paintings with acrylic and porcelain paint on glass in various sizes and the original ceramic installation.

CAN is a study of a studio. Meta still lives. The tools of the trade – brushes, pipettes, turpentine, linseed oil, buckets, paint tubes and cans. The tinsel technique is difficult to master because the artist has to paint in reverse on the backside of the glass. It was a technique Eken first encountered at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. It was mainly practiced by women in America between 1850 and 1890. Eken has been working with tinsel painting for the past 5 years gradually challenging the often very refined finish of the tradition making space for a more gestural expression. Breaking the mold by translating the tools of the original male painter Jackson Pollock through an old feminine folk art tradition. The result is a series of radiant expressive works.

Rose Eken, Born 1976, Denmark, lives and works in Copenhagen.
She was educated at Royal College of Art in London. Currently Rose Eken’s large scale ceramic installation Tableau can be viewed at ARoS Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the exhibition No Man Is An Island – The Satanic Verses.

Kilde: V1 Gallery