Peter Linde Busk - Point D'appui

About

Josh Lilley is thrilled to be presenting Peter Linde Busk's first solo show at the gallery. Point D'appui includes ceramics and smaller works, as well as 9 large-scale paintings from his critically acclaimed exhibition at Holstebro Kunstmuseum in Denmark earlier this year. To that end this eclectic show introduces the full spectrum of his production to a London audience, harnessing the multiple elements and processes within his oeuvre.

Linde Busk's practice covers a wide range from painting on canvas and copper, to drawing, collage, graphics, and ceramic sculptures. All these mediums supplement one another to form a cohesive if quirky universe. Generally, there is a combination of abstraction (decoration) which appears to provide a sense of order, and figuration which appears more expressive. Hence, many of the works are characterised by more or less twisted humanoid figures and an extensive use of patterns lying like a web in the picture plane.

Like medieval paintings, many of Linde Busk's figures appear flat and two dimensional on the surface. However they are built up through many thin layers of paint, and are often scrawled over a rich structure of collage or stitching. He is committed to the potential of excess materials, and the three Staging Area paintings in the exhibition, are an homage to failure or unrealised ideas. The stitches are off-cuts from previous works which are then painstakingly cared for and brought back into being. This routine interest in waste and the re-processing of materials also connects him to other forms of art. The
idiosyncratic re-working of an image - as a survival strategy almost, has focused his attention on the art of the mentally ill. The mask is also a recurrent theme; expressed through the divide between one's inner emotional state and the outside world, as the trauma of their collision with one another.

With this in mind, he employs a cast of characters in his works to figure states of melancholia, anxiety, dejection and failure. His celebration of the antagonist is inspired by card design, literature and popular culture, tending towards portrayals of those who sit high: Kings and knights often prevail, their stature betrayed by their audacious attire. Violently patterned, his images draw on
the starkly direct marks of Art Brut, where his drive to fill space to excess means that the figure is often decorated to the point of parody. Across his practice Busk sets up moments of suspension; Recalling the ruptured landscapes of Casper David Friedrich, his semi-figurative ceramic objects undulate on the threshold between viscous mass and emerging detail, almost embryonic like - retaining a powerful and raw immediacy. Elsewhere, as in his printmaking, graphic line clings against the ballistic daubs gathering beneath - threatening a complete un-doing.

Peter Linde Busk ' Born 1973 in Copenhagen, Denmark, lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Busk completed his MFA at the The Royal Academy of Arts London in 2009. Previous solo exhibitions include The Carollers of Kölbig, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, 2013, The Staging Area, Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Holstebro, Denmark, 2013 and No Pasaran, MONITOR, Rome, 2012. Selected group exhibitions include Post Post Anxiety International Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles 2013, Murder Ink, Der Grieche, Berlin 2012, Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2010, and Daily Miracles, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, 2009.