Anders Scrmn Meisner

The Pit is pleased to present “Giant Postcards of Affection,” a solo exhibition of new works by Danish artist Anders Scrmn Meisner, his first with the gallery.

The Danish author Inger Christensen begins her seminal Fibonacci-inspired poetry collection Alphabet by listing things that exist: apricot trees exist, greylag geese exist, hydrangeas, lakes, and June nights exist. The continued repetition and accumulation of images have a physicalizing effect: the words appear as vignettes. The corresponding objects, arranged in mise en scènes and still lifes, feel tangible as if by the poet’s final line, you could reach out and touch one.  

Anders Scrmn Meisner’s paintings perform a similar transfiguration in the opposite direction. His distilled but not abstract water lilies, sailboats, setting suns, swans, lilacs, and fireflies are arranged like poems across canvas or, as the title suggests, scrawled on postcards. The tension between dense, delicate dabs and simple opaque shapes lends the compositions their lyrical sensibility, symbolically charged and emotionally resonant. The brilliant color combinations estrange the familiar, creating space for interpretations that transcend the limits of visual representation. 

Disavowing illusions of depth, Meisner avoids linear perspectives and modeling. Instead, his compositions evoke the flat planes characteristic of ukiyo-e, a style of Japanese woodblock printing that depicts “the floating world” or the fleeting moments that constitute daily living. Think: a carp leaping, a woman’s kimono caught on a branch, a blossom carried in the wind. While Meisner's botanical patterns and sensual details reflect the intricate prints, his renderings of textiles, vases, and shell-shaped vanity boxes pay homage to the decorative arts tradition that inspired them. 

The layering of calligraphic marks, repeating motifs, and swathes of unobscured color collapses any lingering distinction between foreground and background. This confluence of figures and landscapes aptly embodies one of the primary tenets of Zen Buddhism: the interdependence of all living things. Accordingly, the artist’s reverence for the natural world is borne out in his restless textures, telluric tones, and formal imagery. In works like Waterlilies, That Look In Your Eyes and Great Nap White Swan Fresh Lilacs, he celebrates the Buddhist belief in the ephemerality of organic matter, preserving the fulsome blooms of fast-fading flowers. 

Elsewhere, the vigor and vibrancy of his inexorably entwined color and line have a simmering, shimmering effect on the materials. As with French Sailboats and Jazz Landscape, where verdant emerald trees sway in the breeze beside flowing, light-flecked bodies of cobalt-cyan-cobalt-cyan water under blazing vermillion suns set against mimosa-yellow skies. This world is simultaneously familiar and from a waking dream, contemporary and that of ancient history. 

Indeed, Meisner synthesizes observation and sensation, the real and fantastical, so that the decorative and subjective become one and the same. By privileging the transformative power of the imagination and the mystical potency of nature, his images acquire a symbolic, almost allegorical sheen. What we glean from his cornflowers is not the nature of a cornflower but its vitality: not its physiology but the experience of its presence, of being presently in a field full of cornflowers on a summer afternoon. 

Along with reverence and revelry, the range of large-scale paintings comprising “Giant Postcards of Affection” provoke feelings of nostalgia, solace, and delight. Delight in the absurdity of existing in a body in time and space surrounded by other bodies, beings, animate and inanimate things. Yes, swans exist. Fireflies exist. Guitar amps exist. Paintings that are poems and poems that are paintings exist. Yes, you and I exist. —Tara Anne Dalbow