Judit Kristensen

Oct 14

‘Vanity’

14.10.2023 — 19.11.2023

PLUS-ONE Gallery presents the solo exhibition 'Vanity' by Judit Kristensen at the gallery (South).

Poised between phenomenological rituals and capitalist violence, sleep and dream, hysteria and catalepsy, the actors animated by Judit Kristensen’s vital and creative drive, thoroughly examining the physiological and psychological parameters of this inner, translucent theater, they seem to swim with difficulty finding their way among the rarefied remnants of an authentic reality with an uncertain future.

Judit Kristensen, making use of the vanitas, gives us the most intimate aspects of a very personal and evolutionary Weltanschauung, taking distance from everything about the narrow ego and confined to the here and now. She does this through mise en scènes which are once strongly intimist and autobiographical in nature, aimed at a more essential spontaneity, not only in reference to our being in the world but also to our interrelational ampullae.

Excerpt of the exhibition text by Domenico de Chirico (translated by Vashti Innesali), 2023

Judit Kristensen (°1990) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium
Even though there appears to be an auto biographical line in Judit Kristensens works, the works does not seem like depictions of surroundings but rather like implemented inner visions or staged scenes, like a stifled theather with pent-up drama and uncertain fate. The works let the viewer peek into uncanny private spheres with an underlying threat, and Netflix, Coca Cola bottles and previous days Cheerio bowls. There seems to be an existential core in the works, and recurring attempts to charge the mundane with emotional tension. The isolationist gloom, the thrembling interiors and psychologically loaded private rooms with an absinth green screen lighting that makes the cold pink vibrate, appears to pick up on a tradition left by Scandinavian modernists such as Edvard Munch, Vera Nilsson and Vilhelm Hammershøi.