This exhibition has passed
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Julie NordXenoglossy
With a confident hand, the Danish contemporary artist Julie Nord depicts the forms of reality. It’s easy to recognise the motifs and details in her teeming visual world. Much feels both safe and familiar, but the more we look, the more we see. Is it all an illusion or reality? Scenes of everyday idylls or images of nightmares?
In Julie Nord’s large-scale drawings, everything is present – side by side and interwoven. Wide-eyed young girls coexist with fantastical animal figures, while the sweet, orderly and well-mannered are subtly frayed at the edges by the threatening, the chaotic and the dangerous. Her images scratch at the surface of the reality we think we know and question idealised images and accepted narratives.
Julie Nord works with pencil, felt-tip pens, watercolour and ink, often on a large scale. She draws inspiration from children’s books, films and horror stories, but also from everyday life and art history.
The exhibition takes its name from an occult linguistic phenomenon, Xenoglossy — a state in which a person in trance suddenly begins to speak a language they neither understand nor have learnt in a normal, waking state. Large wall paintings lead us into the exhibition’s atmospherically coloured rooms, filled with visual stories without beginning or end.
participating artists
