GRIMM is pleased to present Sowing in half-light, a solo exhibition of new works by Danish artist Anders Davidsen, on view at the Amsterdam gallery from 13 September until 12 October 2024.

When I stand before a painting by Anders, I feel my desire is often first awakened by the composition of light, and the paradox of how the light in his work is fueled by the shadows. Ultramarines and Carmine reds are pressed and scraped against one another, becoming each other's support. Colors get hard to distinguish, and the naming becomes secondary to the feeling they infuse one with. With their humming shapes, they lead you in. These hovering fields of shadow and depth at first seem soft until one's gaze hits the cracks that span across the surface. Following the cracks, I fall into a burnt-away hole in the linen like a tree branch once cut away and now healed. Anders’ paintings feel spiritual, if spiritual means where the earth meets the sea and where the sea meets the heavens.

Along his studio walls, you’ll find old watercolors of sights once seen. When asked about the sea in the work, Anders tells me it’s the sea off the coast of his native Jutland, in the west of Denmark. Particularly reminiscent of the summers spent in his grandparents’ home near the ocean in all its expanse, a place where time didn’t feel linear.

In his studio, he always has some nailed-up, cut-out linens with endless touches of color rubbed off. It's a site where colors hold onto one another in fields of vibrating light and shadow, creating an index of color that happens side by side with the painting practice.

I feel I'm digressing by not speaking of the dryness of these works; it’s something Anders is a master of, not unlike his countryman Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864 -1916). Anders lets his colors vibrate, not through the shimmering qualities we usually associate with oil paints but through his immense sensitivity when it comes to the way he makes his pigment breathe on his surfaces. This somewhat crass and vibrating dryness is not unlike the beauty of a fresco, which has aged through the centuries with some of the pigments faded and with cracks in the plaster. These works can serve as a container for a life lived; the cracks hold onto time, and the sunrise and the sunset are, for me, the signifiers of birth and death.

(Text by Anton Munar, July 2024. Fellow artist and peer of Anders Davidsen. Following nearly ten years of friendship, his words are inspired by conversations shared in each other’s studios about family, nature, birth, and death)

Anders Davidsen (b. 1987 in Mariagerfjord, DK) lives and works in Knebel (DK). He studied at the Danish Royal Academy from 2017 to 2023 in Copenhagen (DK).

Recent solo exhibitions include, Voices in silver, Painters Painting Paintings, Hertfordshire (UK) and Evening Flower, ADZ, Lisbon (PT). Selected group exhibitions include, Bernheim x ADZ Gallery: group exhibition, Bernheim, Zurich (CH); The lurid season, M+B, Los Angeles, CA (US); Mythic materials, Formation Gallery, Copenhagen (DK); Leva, Arcway Nightlands Connector, Copenhagen (DK); BFA exhibition, Danish Royal Academy, Copenhagen (DK).

Working on linen, Anders Davidsen’s paintings are built from the depths of an undercoat of weatherbeaten brown. Multiple layers of oil paint are then applied directly from the tube in thin, dry layers, pressing the pigments into the tinted chalk gesso. Davidsen then scrubs and wipes away the paint to reveal reflections on the water’s surface as the paint dries.

This meditative process is a race against time, akin to the tension between power and peacefulness of changing sea tides. He is careful not to overwork the surface, so these coloured layers dance lightly across the textured linen, ebbing and flowing like undulating waves. Seasonal variations are created through the application of deep reds reminiscent of hazy and humid summer mornings; or muted, softer tones suggesting a crisp winter’s fog rolling across the canvas.