Galleri Bo Bjerggaard will open its second solo exhibition with the visual artist Peter Linde Busk (b. 1973). The exhibition And in That Place He Did Succumb to What Was Offered will open in the gallery’s west-facing exhibition rooms, and will contain a number of brand-new reliefs, a ‘pulp painting’, a unique ‘ghost print’ on wood and two new woodcuts, one of which is printed on copper foil.

Peter Linde Busk’s works comprise a cornucopia of detail and materials that combine in a simultaneously symbiotic and chaotic state. Close up, the works appear abstract in their elegant detailing and tactility, but at a distance, an odd gallery of characters emerges. Where ornamentation and patterns previously formed the background for the real motifs in the artist’s work, the deformed figures now often twist themselves in and out between the foreground and the background, without ever acquiring an actual location or a place to rest.

The work series Masterless Men is a good example of this; the reliefs are populated by men who seem drifting, homeless and detached, but at the same time almost as though they have been absorbed by the life around them. The expression Masterless Men derives from the English Revolution, after which a whole caste of travelling craftsmen became redundant and lost their identity. Existential and human suffering forms a common theme in the artist’s work, in which morality and decay are closely linked, and collapse appears almost inevitable.

The exhibition title And in That Place He Did Succumb to What Was Offered sounds a sombre note, and as the associations pour forth, you quickly realise that in Peter Linde Busk’s pictorial universe, darkness and beauty are closely related. The artist’s eclectic approach to his material is reflected in his titles, which are drawn from the Bible, American literature and the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.

Recycling is a central aspect of Peter Linde Busk’s practice. The reliefs, which can only barely be categorised as such, but which in purely technical terms consist of a mixture of mosaic, relief and collage, are made up of accumulations of materials from the artist’s work process. Nothing is thrown away – everything is saved for future use. In the works are thus found traces of glass, wood, copper, ceramics, etc., from the artist’s previous works. The recycled material is processed and incorporated into new motifs and contexts, in a circular and unending process.

Peter Linde Busk was born in Copenhagen in 1973. He trained at the Slade School of Fine Art (London), Hunter College of Art (New York) and the Royal Academy of Arts (London), from which he graduated in 2009. In 2008, he studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Professor Peter Doig. Busk’s works are represented in the Rubell Family Collection (Miami) and the Saatchi Collection (London), and here in Denmark in Holstebro Kunstmuseum and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj. Follow Artists In This Show