Danish artist Benny Dröscher’s
recent work in sculpture and
drawing has been focused on
challenging the illusory certainty
of form through art-historical
investigations which attempt to
find a visual language for sculpture
equivalent to that used in painting,
especially historical religious
painting. In so doing, the artist
highlights sculpture’s materiality,
the artificial nature of painting
and the unrealistic – though to his
BENNY DROSCHER Each month ArtReview asks an artist mind essential – task that sculpture
to create an original work of art faces when attempting to perform
for the magazine. Though the work on a spiritual or symbolic level.
may be inspired by themes, ideas or
the work of artists found elsewhere A starting point for accomplishing
in the issue, it may equally come this aim – part of his exploration
purely from the artist’s own of the human desire to believe in
interests and preoccupations at something beyond the everyday – is,
the moment of conception. Apart from not surprisingly, the use of forms
the constraints of the magazine page with fundamentally symbolic meaning.
and the appearance, somewhere in the A recent commission in the centre
image, of two circular forms, there of Copenhagen (Rome on Kgs.Nytorv,
are no instructions given. 2006), for example, takes the rays
of light or halos often painted
Benny Dröscher’s creation for the around religious figures in
July/August issue, One night a Renaissance painting and builds
Pisanello hare taught me new them in a larger-than-life size
ways of showing things (2007, from a highly reflective material.
acrylic on canvas, 28 x 44 cm),
can be seen overleaf. Dröscher does not attempt to
disguise the materials he is
using, despite the challenges they
present to symbolic understanding.
Instead he addresses these
difficulties through humour and
play on the natural and artificial.
Dröscher was born in Aalborg
in 1971, and lives and works in
Copenhagen. He has had many solo
exhibitions of his work in Denmark,
as well as group shows throughout
Scandinavia and in Germany,
Italy and the US. His first solo
exhibition in the UK was at Rokeby
gallery, London, earlier this year.
ReviseManifesto Front_pg 23.indd1 1 8/6/07 16:08:01
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