Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce, Fredrik Værslev's New curtain bangs, an exhibition of new works by Fredrik Værslev at its 394 Broadway location.

Fredrik Værslev’s latest body of work consists of large strips of painted cotton (i.e., canvas) arranged and displayed as sets of curtains.

On the basic level of biography, these works reference one of the artist’s oldest aesthetic experiences: a primal, prelingual sense that his mother’s choice of bright colors and brash patterns for covering up his childhood home’s windows had something deliberately ‘artful’ about it. On the slightly more elevated level of the artist’s continuing interrogation of the codes and conventions that constitute the expanded field of painting, Vaerslev’s curtain paintings seem to question the age-old metaphor of painting as a window onto the world – any window, any world. Perhaps painting is the curtain designed to sabotage this epochal dream of total transparency instead?

And on the Olympian level of founding myths and memes, finally, the legend of the fifth-century Greek painter Zeuxis as recounted in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History comes to mind: ‘The contemporaries and rivals of Zeuxis were Timanthes, Androcydes, Eupompus, and Parrhasius. This last, it is said, entered into a pictorial contest with Zeuxis, who represented some grapes, painted so naturally that the birds flew towards the spot where the picture was exhibited. Parrhasius, on the other hand, exhibited a curtain, drawn with such singular truthfulness, that Zeuxis, elated with the judgment which had been passed upon his work by the birds, haughtily demanded that the curtain should be drawn aside to let the picture be seen. Upon finding his mistake, with a great degree of ingenuous candor he admitted that he had been surpassed, for that whereas he himself had only deceived the birds, Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist’.

And so the story of art begins – by way of subterfuge: ‘nothing to see here’.

(Text by Dieter Roelstraete)

Fredrik Værslev (b. 1979, Moss, Norway) lives and works in Drammen and Vestfossen, Norway. In 2023, Værslev's work was the subject of the solo exhibition titled Fredrik Værslev: Platting, at Haugar Kunstmuseum, Tønsberg, Norway. Værslev's work was also recently included in the group exhibition, Everybody talks about the weather, Fondazione Prada, Venice, 2023. In 2018, the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, presented an extensive survey exhibition of his work titled Fredrik Værslev, as I imagine him. Other past solo exhibitions include: Le renne, Fonds regional d’art contemporain Bretagne, Rennes, France, 2022, Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst, Delmenhorst, Germany, 2019, Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo, 2019, Tan lines, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2017, travelled to Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany, 2018, and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, 2018, All around amateur, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway, 2016, travelled to Le Consortium, Dijon, France, 2016, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, 2015, CAC – Passerelle, Brest, France, 2015, and The power station, Dallas, 2014, among others. Værslev is held in the permanent collections of Astrup Fearnley Musset, Oslo, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Le Consortium, Dijon, France, Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, and Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, among others.