Benny Dröscher Lurking for Transcendental Moments••••

Benny Droscher, With My Head Bent Auspiciously over the Centre Copyright the artist, courtesy Rokeby

Benny Dröscher investigates visual language and how we perceive the world around us. As a contemporary sculptor he challenges the traditional medium, its materiality and the artificiality and illusory certainty of form.

Dröscher in concerned with the language of art history and endeavors to correspond the visual language used in painting, especially historical religious painting, with that of sculpture. In so doing the artist highlights sculptures materiality, the artificial nature of painting and the unrealistic task that sculpture faces when attempting to perform on a spiritual or symbolic level. And he delights in doing so.

Looking to art historical references from the Baroque, to Pop and animation, Dröscher investigates our desire to believe in something beyond the everyday. His installations and sculptures are born from forms with fundamentally symbolic and often religious meanings. A recent commission for the centre of Copenhagen, I am so tired of being an atheist, takes the rays of light or halo’s often painted around religious figures in the Renaissance or found on the altarpieces of Baroque Catholic churches and builds them into a larger than life size form finished in tiny mosaic mirrors. Light reflects from the installation dazzling passers-by, though the artist has made no attempt to disguise the materials or his techniques. Walk behind the large and shimmering sculpture and wooden plinths, polystyrene forms and the deft use of a glue gun are revealed.

Using a vast array of relatively mundane yet highly seductive and seemingly incompatible materials ranging from foam, fur, tree branches, Polystyrene and crystals, Dröscher plays with the traditional mechanisms and materiality of sculpture and how we organise and understand the world around us. Acknowledging that we view sculpture in relation to form, and the physical space that it occupies Dröscher understands that this physicality overrides any initial symbolic reading, however Dröscher insists that sculpture preserves a symbolic level. His use of materials and form persuade the viewer to respond instinctively to what should be disparate and often illogical or even kitsch arrangements functioning within the realm of illusion. Dröscher sets up new rules by which to play through an investigation of sculptures discordant relationship between form and symbolic content, and he has fun doing it.

Benny Dröscher graduated from The Jutland Academy Of Fine Arts in Aarhus, Denmark in 1996. His work is represented in major public collections throughout Scandinavia including the Arken Museum of Modern Art, The Danish National Gallery, Statens Kunstfond, the Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden and in the collections of Nykredit and NoVo Nordica in Denmark. He was recently commissioned by The Danish Academy in Rome to produce a site-specific public installation in central Copenhagen where the artist lives and works. This is his first solo exhibition in the UK.