Kasper Sonne: Your Feelings Are Wrong

Quartz Studio is pleased to present Your Feelings Are Wrong, the first solo show in Turin by the Danish artist Kasper Sonne (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1974).

“The new paintings are as much about the large abstract, or at least abstracted parts, as they are about figure and narrative. […] My interests can be identified as a fascination with the destructive elements in man and nature, combined with an overall feeling of displacement and melancholy. […] By man and nature, I mean the destructive urges in mankind, like in the theory of the death drive, and the violence of nature.”

With three large paintings, Your Feelings Are Wrong, There’s Nothing You Can Do to Me (That I Haven’t Already Done Myself), both from 2021, and Flag (2022), Kasper Sonne returns to the figurative work of his early years, yet he takes the details to a minimum in favor a synthesis that has a quality of primitivism and a return to order. In the concisely defined space that the colors make almost two-dimensional, the main characters have a consistency that verges on sculptural. The colors are few but intense, those of the Italian Transavantgarde. The paintings’ subjects, two boxers and a boy wearing soccer shorts, are taken to the level of contemporary archetypes. Their inexpressive faces and isolation convey a solitude more psychological than physical. These presences make universal the human sense of displacement in nature/the surrounding space, in a constant emotional oscillation underlying the death drive.

Kasper Sonne (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1974) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation in 2000 and has been living and working between Copenhagen and New York for the past fifteen years. After having worked predominantly within an abstract visual framework, in recent years Sonne has returned to the figurative approach of his early career in a new series of large- and small-scale works on linen. In his “THM” series from the late 2010s, Sonne created a number of collage-adjacent paintings in which pages from the New York Times were applied to canvas and gradually overlaid with thin washes of paint until almost all of the linguistic signifiers were totally obscured. The extended contemplation of “newsworthy” images that this slow and methodical process necessitated naturally fueled Sonne’s gradual return to working with more explicitly figurative motifs. His newest compositions often depict expansive and desolate landscapes that grapple with the psychological complexities of isolation and expand individual mental states to the scale of the tectonic. Throughout his practice, Sonne has continuously investigated the way we interpret our surroundings and make sense of the world we live in by purposefully constructing and deconstructing reality. Kasper Sonne’s exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at museums and galleries such as Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, US (2022); A Hug From The Art World, New York, US (2019); Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2018); HEART Museum, Denmark (2016); The Arts Club, London, UK (2015); West, Den Haag, Netherlands (2014); Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy (2014); SALTS, Basel, Switzerland (2013); The Hole, New York, US (2013); Primo Piano, Paris, France (2012); SAPS museum, Mexico City, Mexico (2010) and V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2009), as well as group exhibitions at Brigade Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021), Collaborations Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2018), Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno, Italy (2016), Fergus McCaffrey in New York, US (2015); Kunstverein Kolnberg, Cologne (2015), Germany; Den Frie - Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark (2015); Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, US (2014); National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples, Italy (2014); Centre d’art Contemporain, Clichy, France (2014); Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, US (2014); The Moving Museum, Dubai, Emirates (2013), Gl. Holtegaard – gallery for contemporary and modern art, Denmark (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2012); Bass Museum of Art, Miami, US (2011); Museo de San Carlos, Mexico City, Mexico (2008); Seventeen Gallery, London, UK (2007) and Galerie Krinzinger, Wien, Austria (2006). Sonne’s works are included in several public collections, such as Fuban Art Foundations, Taiwan, David Roberts Art Foundation, London and HEART Museum, Herning, Denmark.