Hypernatural, Astrid Kruse Jensen

Title: Hypernatural

Artist: Astrid Kruse Jensen

Text: Astrid la Cour

Year: 2005

Type: Softcover catalogue

Publisher: Galleri Image

Catalogue for the exhibition "Hypernatural" by Astrid Kruse Jensen at Galleri Image.

Her photographs of outdoor swimming pools in Iceland are taken at night, devoid of people. There is none of the public life and spirit of community that is normally part of the pool as social architecture. The quiet in the photographs seems merely temporary, however; there is a promise of materialization, of presence.

The potential that is inherent in this quiet and sense of absence is linked to the special light that infuses these photographs. Astrid Kruse Jensen only uses the ambient light that is present at these places. Her long exposures result in a very intense visualization of the light inside the houses and in the outdoor lamps. These artificial light sources seem to cast a spell over these pools; each place seems to awaken to its own life as darkness infuses the landscape.

Astrid Kruse Jensen's previous work has dealt with the city's space and the cityscape; this exhibition springs from the relationship between our concepts of authentic, untouched nature, and nature's own reality. Her photographs focus on these small, constructed landscapes that are delimited from nature, which in its untouched form is barely visible in the darkening background; thus they tell of a meeting between the well-known and the strange, between the real the imagined. Astrid Kruse Jensen's photographs deal not merely with the estrangement of mankind and nature; their use of artificial light shows the inseparability of the natural and the constructed. The viewer is placed amidst visions of the country's natural beauty, the reality of the place, and the fiction of the photograph.

Astrid Kruse Jensen (born 1975) is one of the young photographic talents who have set their mark on the Danish and international photographic scene.

She studied at The Gerrit Rielveld Academie in Amsterdam and graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2002. She then returned to Denmark, where she now has her base in Copenhagen. She combines her work in Denmark with visits abroad, to Russia and several times to Iceland, where her present exhibition was created.

After her graduation exhibition she exhibited works at the John Kobal Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and since then in Russia, Iceland, England, Scotland, and the United States. Her works are represented in several collections. Later this year she will exhibit in Slovenia, Germany, and Poland. In Denmark, Astrid Kruse Jensen has exhibited at Foto Triennalen 2003, The National Fotomuseum, and at Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen, in addition to her present exhibition of new works at Galleri Image.

The exhibition and catalogue was supported by the Committee for Visual Arts of the Danish Arts Council.