Per Bak Jensen: Testimony

It is our great pleasure to present Testimony, an exhibition of 16 new works by Per Bak Jensen. This is the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with Galleri Bo Bjerggaard.

Bak Jensen is a classic in Danish art. The first student to be admitted to the Royal Academy on the merits of his photography, he has set the standard for generations of artists who use photography as an art medium.

A vastly experienced, incisive artist, he shows us new aspects of the visible world that we often have a hard time seeing with our own eyes. Testimony testifies to a variety of places, whose nature and identity are conveyed to us through the artist’s lens. It’s all there for us to see, if we show ourselves willing to learn from Bak Jensen’s photography. The unmanipulated work encapsulates a section of the world that can be hard to spot. His new images are primarily of nature, but not necessarily innocuous, attractive nature. Culture imperceptibly creeps in on nature, and the human impact is constantly present—most radically through the artist cropping and transposing nature to the gallery.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Marc-Christoph Wagner contemplating Bak Jensen’s photos in light of the world we live in: “Being human today, existing in this day and age, means confronting enormous forces. Most of us try to live in spite of it. Clinging to the hope that there is a way through the tumult.” Wagner is a German-born political scientist, specializing in the political history of ideas, and a former Northern European correspondent for German radio and television. He has been the head of the Louisiana Channel since its establishment in 2012. This year, the channel is expected to release its 1000th video of an artist, architect, writer or the like. In The Insistent Gaze, Wagner aims to identify why Bak Jensen’s depopulated pictures are so human, present and inscrutable. “For this photographer, it’s not a matter of seeing far. It’s about seeing. Period.”