OPEN
Dear Landscape,
Like the British Romantic poets Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth, I peek through a toned window of an air-conditioned vehicle and grasp a prospect of the rural landscape in Denmark that presents itself as flat, monotonous, and archaic. The glorious time of growth and prestige is long gone; what remains is an intensive monoculture and a ticking bomb of climate change. The nerve-racking drought of 2022 (arguably) caused by global warming is showcasing how agricultural systems around Europe are seeing their final stages, and the increasing scarcity of flowing water is causing declined living standards. From above, endless squares of farms are taking up space and manufacturing synthesized landscapes that seem just as ‘natural’ as the surrounding forest scenery.
Previously I have been exploring the constructed recreative landscapes depicted and represented by early Romantic painters and Danish and British poets. I have been interested in how these landscapes relate to Norse mythology as well as contemporary ideas about nature—and how these ideas manifest themselves in an industrial society.
Namely, a society where we dwell in a cottage as if it was a scenography of an abandoned theater. An alienation of the cityscape, in which new farms and cottages must arise, rural life becomes a cosplay flowing with oat milk, sourdough and remediated dinners with wildflower bouquets, beautiful arrangements that decompose onto the linen tablecloth, leaving a mark that will show us the succession of cycles.
These very cycles must revitalize themselves so as not to keep us in this iron fist of time. How we grow the grass, plough the field, rake the hay, feed the cattle, slaughter the livestock and fill our stomachs. New technologies, the freedom of intelligent beings, the aeroponic future. We must act as the seasons, embrace self-sufficiency, and forget the rigid ideas of the outside left behind by the Enlightenment.
The algae—and the bogs, rivers, lakes and oceans in which it dwells—appears thick as oil, and saturated as pigments. It is the organism that grew on the roofs of Northern ancestors that can fuel our future and construct utilities just as the dinosaur bones of the ancient time. With its toxic traits and beneficial attitude, it grows on my skin as I lay still in the bog, waiting for the cycles to subsume my corpus.
Oh thy flattened landscape, you who make me go mad. I want to know your inner secrets and mount hills in your boring climate. I want to bury myself within your ancient mounds as the Neolithic humans, the masters of domestication. They, who took the forest as their clay, molded the future. I want to ride with the steam engine toward new territories and explore how fast this vehicle can go, beyond the consensus, into an oblivion of truth.
Theodor Nymark
The exhibition Dear Landscape, marks Theodor Nymark’s latest attempt
to explore ecology as both catalyst and resource for creativity, presenting
a series of new paintings that continues the artist’s experiments with
algae powder, or spirulina, with illustrations printed on durable fire- and
water-resistant PVC. This group of works is part of Nymark’s ongoing
series “Drafts of Ecology,” which, with both projects and individual works,
studies the theory and concept of ecology, and explores the terminology
in biological, aesthetic, and political frameworks. The short film made by
the artist himself is narrated with a letter addressed to the endearing
landscape, responding to its changing features and bleak future amid the
most serious climate crisis of our time.
Theodor Nymark
CarloDalgas_blackandwhitecowstanding_#1, 2022
Spirulina on heavy-duty PVC tarp
15.7 x 11.8 in / 40 x 30 cm
Through vector line drawings based on carefully selected paintings from
Danish art history, the almost topographical illustrations and figures
emerge. When placed upon a fixed grid, the imagery points toward
concepts of recycling history, rewriting it and building new narratives from
already existing ones, just as mythology always does.
Theodor Nymark
CarloDalgas_blackandwhitecowstanding_#2, 2022
Spirulina on heavy-duty PVC tarp
15.7 x 11.8 in / 40 x 30 cm
The PVC, acting as the painter’s canvas in the present work, is stretched
onto wooden stretcher bars, mimicking painting traditions that do not
typically apply to such materials. These illustrations arise from thorough
investigation into the history of Danish painting, more specifically, into the
Modern Breakthrough. In this historical movement, rural landscapes and
genre scenes of Scandinavian workers, households and animals were
depicted in a more realistic manner, in great opposition to the early
Romantic paintings depicting more constructed gardens and recreational
aristocratic scenes.
Theodor Nymark
TheodorPhillipsen_threehorsesbyawateringtrough, 2022
Spirulina on heavy-duty PVC tarp
15.7 x 11.8 in / 40 x 30 cm
Theodor Nymark
TheodorPhillipsen_headofacow, 2022
Spirulina on heavy-duty PVC tarp
15.7 x 11.8 in / 40 x 30 cm
By going through exhibitions and catalogs, Nymark selects imagery from
which the illustrations derive, referring to representations of certain
agricultural scenarios, such as the cycles of nutrition and the system it
relies upon. Some pieces depict haystacks laid freely as ephemeral
sculptures on a field; some portray horses bringing in the harvested hay;
some detail the animals that feed on the hay (namely cattle and horses);
and lastly others render the image of hay raking, which is a practice of
turning grass around in intervals in order for it to dry and serve as nutrition
for cattle, horses, pigs and other livestock. This practice is similar to turning
the images around in order for them to become relevant anew.
Theodor Nymark
BerthaWegmann_Harvestscenefromparis, 2022
Spirulina on heavy-duty PVC tarp
15.7 x 7.9 in / 40 x 20 cm
Historically, nutrition as an agricultural concept is closely connected with
hay production, however, as of now, animal feed is highly manufactured,
involving multi-step processing. Instead of hay, more cost-effective raw
materials such as soybeans or corn became widely used in the farming
industry. That said, as one might already know through numerous
documentaries and news articles, growing these ingredients for livestock
is causing serious deforestation leading to immense CO2 emissions. The
current work thereby aims to showcase the rigid history, and to explore
alternatives of how we can inhabit our surrounding environment.
Theodor Nymark
BerthaWegmann_turningthehay, 2022
Spirulina on heavy-duty PVC tarp
15.7 x 14.2 in / 40 x 36 cm
Theodor Nymark
JørgenVSonne_harvestscene_withthegrainbeingbroughtin, 2022
Spirulina on heavy-duty PVC tarp
15.7 x 9.8 in / 40 x 25 cm
The works also act as an experiment following an ongoing painterly practice
of inhabiting the algae powder in various mediums with different
expressions and techniques. The artist uses algae to explore its materiality
and utility. Not only is it a trendy nutritional superfood in contemporary
bohemian life, but it also has significance for the world’s biosphere, with
technological research counting biofuel, organic pigments, biodegradable
plastics, and medicine. As a material with a multitude of visual qualities, the
algae has an absolutely brilliant color, and changes its nuance with the
amount of sunlight exposure. Algae is also a hazardous photosynthetic
organism that in large amounts (algae bloom) can be deadly to humankind.
The damage-causing pollutive algae bloom is due to the overly nutritional
excess water flowing from Big Ag (industrial agriculture) into great lakes and
oceans, creating a dangerous cornucopia for the algae, therefore presenting
a dialectic interpretation of the most important organism on Earth.
Theodor Nymark
BerthaWegmann_thehayisbeingflipped, 2022
Spirulina on heavy-duty PVC tarp
14.2 x 9.8 in / 36 x 25 cm
About the Artist
Theodor Nymark (b. 1997) is a visual artist, musician, filmmaker, and curator based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He earned his BFA from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2021, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Nymark’s work explores the notion of ecology as a catalyst and resource for creativity. If seen from a macro perspective, his work often connects societal structures, technology, and biology to mythology, spirituality, and phenomenology.
Nymark has recently held exhibitions at Servando Gallery (Havana, Cuba); Kerka Gallery (St. Petersburg, Russia); Overgaden institut for samtidskunst (Copenhagen, Denmark); Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (Copenhagen, Denmark); Brigade Gallery (Copenhagen, Denmark), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, Denmark), Kur Space (Vienna, Austria), and Garage 9 Gallery (Bologna, Italy). His film The Picturesque Beast was included in the official selection of CPH:DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival in 2021. Nymark is also the founder and curator of Salon 75.
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