JACOB JUHL (DK)
KRISTOFFER AXEN (SE)

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Jacob Juhl (DK)

Photo Artist Jacob Juhl, born in 1973 has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Denmark and abroad. Latest to be mentioned is a solo exhibition at Galerie Martin Mertens in Berlin, participation in the international exhibition "Imago Mundi" in Venice and selected artist for BuSho Short Film Festival in Budapest. Jacob Juhl’s recent work provides an opportunity to experience a joyful presence with the overlooked details of everyday life - a shadow on the wall, a faded handle. The work also tries to make present the absence of the unfathomable - the absence of all the things we cannot describe, but which we leave room for nonetheless. Art is the exception where we can try to capture the indescribable, the infinite, and give it a presence in a new shape.

Juhl describes it like this :

Absence
It is about presence and absence, and the absence of presence.
Presence of the almost invisible things in our daily lives that can thrill us as much as the seven wonders of the world. And absence in situations that have the potential to give us experiences for life, but which we miss out on because we are not really there. It is also about the presence of absence. The absence of the things that we cannot describe and never really understand but which we leave room for nonetheless. The absence of that which Barnett Newman called “the sublime” - the indescribable, the infinite, the things we cannot fathom, but still try to capture in art. And sometimes when we almost succeed and an artwork has that “thing”, and hits a nerve, then we are present and are drawn into the presence of absence.

Presence
The artworks in Jacob Juhl’s new series This Which is Next to That accentuate the presence of the tiniest overlooked details of everyday life by way of motifs and cropping. The creative process of the artworks mimics how we construct our reality as an increasing distance to the surrounding world: how we sense and register, categorize and perceive, and finally abstract and conceptualize by means of our verbal and visual languages. The works are photographic in origin and therefore representational. By using a number of creative devices the artworks are removed from their origin to more and more become “themselves”, and less and less a reproduction of a certain time and place.

In other words : The capturing of a NOW becomes a NOW itself.

- Jacob Juhl has produced a catalogue for the exhibition including text by Finn Thrane, founder of The Museum of Photo Art in Odense, and a poem by Danish author Tomas Thøfner, called "63 koans for Jacob Juhl".

Kristoffer Axén (SE)

Swedish Photo Artist Kristoffer Axén presents his second show at Galerie Pi. With constructed, cinematic, images of muted colours bordering the surreal his work is aimed to bring out a sense of enveloping calmness around a feeling of loss undefined, and consequently of a search. With a personal view of the world, but without attachment to names or specific places, he is reproducing dreamlike stills and leaves the viewer in a vague narrative world that is completely open in it’s possibilities for interpretation. Axén is known for his moody and atmospheric photographs. His dark, nearly monochromatic images of shadowy Flâneurs and mysterious alleyways have undergone a detailed post-production where elements and sometimes entire backgrounds have been removed or re-arranged and where a tonality of shadows and selected highlights are woven together.

Axéns work has been exhibited internationally in solo shows in New York (Munch Gallery) and Copenhagen (Galerie Pi), in a two-person show in Stockholm (Gallery Domeij) and in numerous group shows around the world, notably at Liljevalchs Spring Show in Stockholm, at Aperture Gallery in New York and at Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is part of many private and public collections such as the ICP Collection, Michaelis School of Fine Arts and MONA and he has been published in articles and selections from magazines such as the British Journal of Photography, The New York Times and Vogue Italia.