In Call and Response, Søren Behncke gathers a dream team of artists for a conceptual studio session. He evokes the compositional technique of call and response used in music and adapts it for the visual arts.
In the exhibition, Behncke responds to the call of a diverse group of artists such as Henri Matisse, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Alexander Calder, Paul Gauguin, Fernand Léger, Josef Albers, Le Corbusier, Roy Lichtenstein, Theo van Gogh, Max Ernst, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró. In his compositional answers, Behncke transforms, comments, adapts, challenges, paraphrases, and plays. The result is a series of curious, open-ended paintings, prints, and sculptures that engage directly with a contemporary interpretation of art and art history, understanding works of art and art history as a continuous stream of ideas, expressions, questions, and dialogues.
Søren Behncke has worked with this approach at the core of his practice for the past decade, performing pilgrimages to the homes, studios, museums, cities, and geographical areas of the artists he engages in conversation with to access a better understanding of their circumstances and language. In Call and Response, he engages one of his own earlier paintings, Skadestuen, 2007, with this method, creating a very different new composition and painting, The Palace of the King of the Birds, 2024, the title a reference to an unreleased instrumental Beatles composition that has changed form again and again over time. This emphasizes that there is a musicality at play in the visual arts, that works of art are not definitive, but objects with their own agency, changing constantly.
With his approach and exhibition, Behncke asks us to reconsider the manner in which we normally engage with the arts. We are not looking at contemporary relics; we are being called upon. Now, how do we respond?
Kilde:
Eighteen
Eighteen
