Page 4 - Art at VIPERGEN Korr

Allan Otte: Landscape, 2011.
Acrylic on wooden plate, 46.1 x 108.4 cm.
Landscape by Allan Otte is emblematic of the artist’s usual techniques and motifs. The painting depicts a light green and yellowish field, with dark green natural fences and a forest in the horizon where a windmill is seen. Allan Otte is recognized in Denmark for painting man’s clash with nature. Where his motifs can often be immediate and simple, they are always built up by a meticulous painterly technique that is demanding in its method and deconstructing the painting in surprising ways. In this way, Allan Otte builds up his paintings as a kind of puzzle, where each individual brushstroke is shielded from one another, and where a myriad of stripes, lines, grids, and dots makes up the completed picture. From a distance, his works look like photorealistic paintings, but on closer inspection they reveal themselves to be just that – paintings, created by an artist’s hand and with a deep painterly originality. Allan Otte’s paintings are almost always undramatic motifs. His landscape paintings are often empty of people, and his paintings of Danish agriculture present an everyday workflow. But for Allan Otte, it is an important artistic task to precisely depict the landscape and agriculture, because it is a world of motifs that has been romanticized and portrayed misleadingly for centuries. With Allan Otte, one finds no longing for an original nature or for a coexistence between man and animal. On the other hand, his paintings are realistic, sober, and seemingly objective representations. There is an eternal clash between man and nature at play, just like the work Landscape. Here, the title refers to the idea of an original nature, but in practice turns out to be cultivated fields and a windmill on the horizon. The Danish landscape of modern man is not a wilderness but a controlled place where production takes place and is prioritized..
Allan Otte (1978 DK) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2007. He has exhibited his works at institutions such as HEART, DK; Brandts, DK; Fuglsang Art Museum DK; Kunsten Museum for Modern Art, DK; Gl. Holtegaard, DK and Nivågaard’s Museum, DK. Allan Otte has executed several works for the public space, and he is, among other things, represented in the collections of the New Carlsberg Foundation, the Kunsten Museum for Modern Art, Skive Art Museum, the National Arts Foundation, ARKEN Museum for Contemporary Art, HEART, and the OJD Foundation.
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