Anders Brinch: Café Malmø

03.12.2021 - 08.01.2021

Friday December 3rd, Hans Alf Gallery invites everyone to join the opening of the last two exhibitions of the year: Louise Hindsgavl’s “The World Ajar” in the main gallery and Anders Brinch’s “Café Malmø” in our project room.

Cafe Malmø, which is the title of Anders Brinch’s new show, is a real place: a dive bar situated only a stone’s throw from Hans Alf Gallery in a basement below Havnegade 35. Café Malmø is a legendary bar that has been around since the 1870’s, which makes it one of the oldest in Copenhagen. In olden days, it was a seamen’s hangout. Because of that, a certain maritime atmosphere permeates the café, just as an enormous collection of peculiar bottle openers from around the globe adorn the walls and the ceiling above the bar – a result of the exotic travels of old regulars through the years.

Anders Brinch has been a regular at Café Malmø for many years. He particularly loves the atmosphere and the clientele, and he has always been deeply fascinated by the eclectic decor. On numerous occasions, Brinch has channeled the bar in his paintings, which has resulted in a vast series of Café Malmø paintings, where raw, hedonistic drinking culture meets flimsy poetry in what has been dubbed magical social realism. In his new exhibition, we find the biggest installment yet – an imposing painting of two by three meters – but all the works in the show somehow spring from the inexhaustible fountain of inspiration that sits in this innocuous basement in Havnegade.

The largest painting was commissioned by filmmakers Camilla Arlien and Ida Mathilde Karlsson, who have been working on a documentary about the iconic bar for nearly a year. While following the regulars and the proprietor Ole, the team has also documented the making of the painting from the first to the final brushstroke as an integral part of both the movie and the tribute to Café Malmø.

The opening of the show also marks the 50^th birthday of Anders Brinch.

The Summer Show

02.07.2021 - 31.07.2021

As a tribute to all the brilliant artists that Hans Alf Gallery represents, we have put together a special summer exhibition showcasing works by each of the 18 artists currently on our roster.

During the month of July, Hans Alf Gallery will be open Fridays, 12-17, and Saturdays, 11-16, only.

Exhibition view:

Works in the exhibition:

• Jørgen Haugen Sørensen Jørgen Haugen Sørensen
• Jørgen Haugen Sørensen Jørgen Haugen Sørensen
• Jørgen Haugen Sørensen Jørgen Haugen Sørensen
• Mie Olise Kjærgaard Mie Olise Kjærgaard
• Mie Olise Kjærgaard Mie Olise Kjærgaard
• Mie Olise Kjærgaard Mie Olise Kjærgaard
• Frank Fischer Frank Fischer
• Louise Hindsgavl Louise Hindsgavl
• Anders Brinch Anders Brinch
• Andreas Golder Andreas Golder
• Andreas Golder Andreas Golder
• Adam Parker Smith Adam Parker Smith
• Louise Hindsgavl Louise Hindsgavl
• Christian Lemmerz Christian Lemmerz
• Christian Lemmerz Christian Lemmerz
• Anders SCRMN Meisner Anders SCRMN Meisner
• Erik A. Frandsen Erik A. Frandsen
• Erik A. Frandsen Erik A. Frandsen
• Anne Torpe Anne Torpe
• Anne Torpe Anne Torpe
• Armin Boehm Armin Boehm
• Henrik Saxgren Henrik Saxgren
• Christian Lemmerz Christian Lemmerz
• Natasha Kissell Natasha Kissell
• Ralf Kokke Ralf Kokke
• Anders SCRMN Meisner Anders SCRMN Meisner
• Armin Boehm Armin Boehm
• Louise Hindsgavl Louise Hindsgavl
• Christian Achenbach Christian Achenbach
• Christian Achenbach Christian Achenbach
• Christian Achenbach Christian Achenbach
• Christian Lemmerz Christian Lemmerz
• Fredrik Raddum Fredrik Raddum
• Ralf Kokke Ralf Kokke
• Morten Schelde Morten Schelde
• Louise Hindsgavl Louise Hindsgavl
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Anders Brinch: Le Jardin (Under the Moon)

23.04.2021 - 22.05.2021

Friday April 23, Anders Brinch’s new exhibition “Le Jardin (Under the Moon)” opens in Hans Alf Gallery. 

In “Le Jardin (Under the Moon)” Anders Brinch continues his exploration of figurative narratives that are just as romantic and beautiful as they are disturbing and strange. Le Jardin – or “The Garden” – appears to be a fertile starting point for Brinch, who tends to explore tangled organic landscapes through his paintings. The artist himself states that metaphorically Le Jardin represents our planet. Here, he has summoned the Moon as a melancholic mirror which is held up to the world.

Some of the motifs are retrieved from the artist’s own childhood drawings, where he used to make pictures of toucans, caimans, and forests. Anders Brinch grew up in a house, where paintings and reproductions of artists such as Scherfig and Wiinblad adorned the walls, and this is apparent in a lot of his works, which give off an adventurous and almost oriental atmosphere.

Brinch’s paintings, however, tend to gradually lose their innocence along the way, as a naive excitement is replaced by something more surreal and psychedelic, and by a color scheme that belongs to neither Scherfig nor Wiinblad - or Goethe for that matter – but rather feels like something conjured up in an LSD-trip or under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms.

To the artist, the act of drawing and painting has always been a double-sided affair. On one hand it is a way of escaping; a safe and exciting parallel world removed from reality. On the other, it is a way for the artist to process and interpret the world, and ultimately take part in it.

One of the pieces in the exhibition is a remake of an old childhood drawing, which does not exist anymore. It depicted the Amazon, which was being destroyed to make room for a concrete jungle with skyscrapers and big city life. It may seem naïve, but it is a candid comment to current, local issues with the ongoing expansion of Copenhagen, in which urban planning eats up nature. As examples of this, there is the ongoing case of the colonization of Amager Fælled and the great urban plans of the artificial island of Lynetteholmen.

However, in Brinch’s reinterpretation of his childhood drawing, even the artist himself is not certain whether the work describes how civilization and urban life is about to suffocate nature, or whether it is a futuristic post-doomsday scenario hundreds of years from now; a place in which humanity has gone bankrupt and reached the bottom, or where mankind has gone on new, destructive adventures on planets in different galaxies, which gives nature a chance to renew itself on earth.

It is this exact ambiguity that occurs in many of the motifs in the show with visual reflections that connotes death and destruction on one hand, but also rebirth and resurrection on the other.

Though painting is his primary mode of expression, Brinch insists on keeping his options open in terms of other mediums. This shows in “Le Jardin”, where the artist incorporates a handful of transparent plexiglass podiums that function both as three dimensional collages and as a kind of memory bank filled with objects, materials, and general sources of inspiration. On top of the podiums, one finds small organic landscapes and beautiful tactile surfaces made from gypsum and Himalayan salt, which mimic micro plants and life on foreign planets.

The Great Big Winter Show

22.01.2021 - 27.02.2021

Hans Alf Gallery kicks off the 2021 season with a bang, as 11 of it's represented artists showcase new works in what has been appropriately dubbed "The Great Big Winter Show". The participating artists are: Armin Boehm, Erik A. Frandsen, Christian Lemmerz, Mie Olise Kjærgaard, Anders SCRMN Meisner, Louise Hindsgavl, Fredrik Raddum, Henrik Saxgren, Magnus Fisker, Anders Brinch and Anne Torpe.

Due to the current restrictions on physical commerce, The Great Big Winter Show will initially only be open online. Come February, we hope to be able to once again welcome visitors in the gallery.

Exhibition view:

Anders Brinch: Dawn

08.08.2020 - 12.09.2020

Anders Brinch’s exhibition “Dawn” consists of a new series of paintings, in which we are invited on a Dionysian voyage with Death as our companion through grainy landscapes at dawn, where night becomes day.

We are presented with classic Brinch motifs, like the neorealist bar scene with skeletons playing billiards and washed-up aliens, drinking themselves further and further into morning oblivion. But we also find references to American cinema and to the bible, as we’re suddenly having dinner with Adam and Eve both dressed as Death in the Garden of Eden. Or when we’re teleported back in time thousands of years, where two cavemen are roasting a mammoth, they killed – or even millions of years; to the time where dinosaurs roamed.

The paintings are kept in warm, grainy nuances that emulate the flickering state of non-existence that characterizes dawn, and the individual motifs are visual metaphors for the inevitable transformation and change in the unending cycle of life. According to the artist, the works are to be seen as small, poetic and melancholic memento mori: “Remember – you have to die!”

And so, we remember this, but as we move about in the dim light of Anders Brinch’s personal dawn, in the slight gap between night and day, among aliens, dinosaurs, and intoxicated skeletons, the realization somehow doesn’t seem that cruel. Rarely has death been so magnificent.

Erik A. Frandsen & Anders Brinch: Other Rooms, Louder Noises

16.09.16 - 15.10.16

In the duo exhibition, ”Other Rooms, Louder Noises”, Erik A. Frandsen and Anders Brinch - two contemporary, figurative painters with very different approaches to both style, technique and subject matter - are welded together in a seemingly incongruous collaboration.

Anders Brinch explores the dystopian aspects of life through a highly symbolic language that reveals a disturbing yet fascinating outlook on nature with man and animal as the central and at times mythical creatures.

In contrast to the fable-like nowhere land of Brinch’s tropicalism, Erik A. Frandsen embraces the mundane and familiar, as floral compositions and everyday-objects from the living room are distorted, emphasized, hidden or recolored to create a new meaning, a new figurative dimension, where depictions are representations – ideas of objects – rather than the actual objects themselves.

In “Other Rooms, Louder Noises”, each artists’ defining attributes are highlighted in the presence of the other, and the individual works take on roles as soft-glowing counterpoints in an intimate painter’s tête-à-tête.

The works in the “Other Rooms, Louder Noises” are taken from two separate museum exhibitions: “Diamond Souls” by Anders Brinch, which was on display at KIKshh in Roskilde in May 2016; and “The Siege Of…” by Erik A. Frandsen, which ran at Himmerlands Kunstmuseum from late April until early September 2016 in Aars.

Anders Brinch: Cosmic Machine

19.01.18 - 24.02.2018

Ever since he first appeared on the Danish art scene in the mid-naughts, Anders Brinch has earned a reputation for being both artistically wayward and rather uncompromising in his work: He marches to the beat of his own drum, and the universe he evokes on canvas, in ceramic figures and cinematic sequences or through installations, resembles that of no one else. This strange, quasi-psychedelic primordial soup, where aliens, dinosaurs, drunkards and hula girls alike wobble through blurry Teletubbies landscapes, while the entire spectrum of colour explodes around them, is so personal, so eclectic, so unmistakably Brinch.

"Cosmic Machine" is the result of Anders Brinch’s latest excursions into the world, he has created in his own image. Through a series of poetic and offbeat “short stories” that take the form of oil paintings, we are escorted into the galaxy of Brinch’s painterly visions that culminate in an eccentric, Mexican underworld, from where sculptural islands branch out into space.

As is so often the case with Brinch, the works in “Cosmic Machine” present no prefabricated narratives or meaning, but are rather to be understood as visions of the subconscious conveyed through the painting process itself.

As a metatextual ribbon around the show, Anders Brinch’s personal diary of ideas and sketches, which includes a processual overview of the genesis of the show through drawings, collages and notes, will also be on display. More than anything, this provides a precious insight into the tortuous mind of the artist. And as such, the restless scribblings of the diary in an exemplary fashion incapsulate the essence that Anders Brinch initially set out to identify: man’s continuous, hopeful, and ultimately hopeless quest for meaning in the great cosmic machine.

ANDERS BRINCH, Denmark

Anders Brinch (born 1971) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007.

Anders Brinch expresses himself in painting, sculpture and installation combined in various ways. His choice of colors span from delicate pastel to dark and bleak shades. He makes use of materials such as fabric, sequins and plaster as well as organic material such as plants and fish.

Brinch’s work is inspired by psychedelic art, astronomy, popular culture, cartoons, theater and movies. From these impressions he creates a humorous and grotesque imaginary universe that despite the touch of fantasy deals with everyday subjects.

Fascinated by the three dimensional plane in the two dimensional painting, Brinch brings intricacy and levitation to his forms and thereby challenges the confined restrictions of the classical painting. The finished works represent accumulations wherein new combinations, expressions and shapes are born.

Anders Brinch has exhibited widely in Denmark and abroad.His works are represented at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, KUNSTEN Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, Skive Kunstmuseum and Randers Kunstmuseum.

CV 

Available works:

Café Malmø, 2021:

• Fladfisk, 2021 Fladfisk, 2021
• Planetarisk Tåge, 2021 Planetarisk Tåge, 2021
• Maestro-måne med Stjerneskud, 2020 Maestro-måne med Stjerneskud, 2020
• Maestro-krokodille, 2020 Maestro-krokodille, 2020
• Untitled, 2021 Untitled, 2021
•  

Available paintings:

• Extraterrestrial Picnic, 2017 Extraterrestrial Picnic, 2017
• Into the Sculpture, 2015 Into the Sculpture, 2015
• Rodeo, 2015 Rodeo, 2015
• Botanical Garden, 2020 Botanical Garden, 2020
• Le Jardin (Under The Moon), 2021 Le Jardin (Under The Moon), 2021
• Remake, 2021 Remake, 2021
• Night Petanque, 2021 Night Petanque, 2021
• Breakfast, 2021 Breakfast, 2021
• Toucan Reflection, 2021 Toucan Reflection, 2021
•  

• Genie's Dream, 2019 Genie's Dream, 2019
•  

Available sculptures:

• Shark Tank, 2019 Shark Tank, 2019
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Selected Works:

• Afrodite, 2011 Afrodite, 2011
• Alien Island, 2007 Alien Island, 2007
• Cancer, 2006 Cancer, 2006
• Rainbow Island, 2007 Rainbow Island, 2007
• Tahiti drum 'n' bass, 2011 Tahiti drum 'n' bass, 2011
• Tourist Island, 2007 Tourist Island, 2007
• Wild West mutations, 2011 Wild West mutations, 2011
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