Frederik Nystrup-Larsen

Galerie Sardine is pleased to present Skin to Skin w. Dog Daisy, the first solo exhibition in the United States by Copenhagen-based artist Frederik Nystrup-Larsen.

The suite of paintings was produced during the period in which Nystrup-Larsen's young son began to walk, recording his encounters with the landscape surrounding their home in rural Denmark alongside the artist's own sustained observation of it. Flowers, insects, fields, and other recurring forms enter the paintings as both subjects and records of place, with the child's process of encountering and differentiating the world running parallel to the artist's attention to his immediate environment.

These observations unfold within the broader instability of the ecologies they depict. For Nystrup-Larsen, painting operates somewhere between image-making and documentation, testing the possibility of recording a landscape while remaining conscious of the inadequacy of its depiction. Taking up the flower as an elemental and historically persistent motif, Nystrup-Larsen embraces beauty while remaining skeptical of its conventions. These forms shift between lived phenomena and their representations, between specimen, memento, and relic. Across the exhibition, repetition becomes a form of sustained attention, considering what the act of painting might preserve, reproduce, or ultimately fail to hold.