Glowing in the Dark

NOVEMBER  2020 — NYC — Glowing in the Dark is world-renowned Scandinavian Ceramist Bente Skjøttgaard's first solo exhibition in the United States.

Click here to download the exhibition catalogue.

When Skjøttgaard begins her art-making process, her points of departure are ideas concerning, quite plainly, the material and formal properties of clay and broadly observable principles in nature.

She does not do battle with excess, nor does she wrestle with restraint. Her works are more concerned with becoming— tensions between generation and regeneration. The results are inscrutable, sculptural growths. Swelling polyps and large, wild spores that populate an amorphous world of naturalistic abstractions which seems to have originated itself. It's lush and precambrian; there is something fungal about its doting reminders of decay as an extant form of life.

And where there is life, there is often light. The lighting fixtures created by Skøttgaard serenely cast their glow onto the questions surrounding the difference between art and design. Rather than perform the overwrought role of an artist compelled to stage conceptual interrogations, when Skjottgaard asks “what happens when a sculpture has a function?” she leaves the question suspended beside the object; it is merely a conceptual spectre.

Skjøttgaard sees her work as an on-going development, extending forward into time. The results of her mode of making art lend themselves to formal discoveries, which yield as many questions as they do answers.

As cause produces effect, one thing must lead to the next. These sculptures appear before us as though by way of some emergent property of an enigmatic natural process governed by its own perplexing rules and rigors. In the artist’s own words, “I will never completely finish— fortunately.”

The gallery is open by appointments only. To book an appointment, please email info@jasonjacques.com. You can also call us at +1 212 535 7500.