Peter Linde Busk

Josh Lilley is proud to present Hold Your Own, an exhibition of new work by Danish artist Peter Linde Busk incorporating new paintings, wall reliefs, mosaic and prints. Anchored by a complex, monumental work, Hold Your Own atomizes into a suite of new small paintings informed in equal measure by a career’s worth of characters and the material lessons of the show’s centerpiece.

Busk is a feral Academy artist; he has acquired, and then exploited, all the skills that education allows. His appetite and searching attitude have rendered him a consistently restless and hard-to-define artist: he has made paintings; paintings in unconventional media that close in on collage; prints of every kind, from etchings to woodcuts and monoprints; sculpture in clay and bronze; paintings made out of sculpture until they become sculptures; mosaics; textiles. He has embraced everything the hand can make. First a figurative painter, his practice has expanded at a steady rate, growing thicker with each new technique he has taken on.

The emblem of this exhibition is Mand Falder IV, a large work containing the totality of his practice to this point. It is covered in jigsawed plates of carved wood, fired ceramic, stapled down slivers of prints, stones, ink, paints, and printing plates. It is a maze of abstraction whose every mark bears the hand of the maker, yet it offers no answers and no route. Despite echoes of Mike Kelley’s Memory Ware works (and all the vernacular American art they imply), as well as the proto-Situationist CoBrA movement and 1980s Occidental Neo-Expressionism, Busk’s full reliefs strike their own mood, a result of their own journey.

The name of the four Mand Falder works translates as Man Falling, itself the title of a 2013 documentary about the Danish artist Per Kirkeby recovering from a late-life brain injury and figuring out if he could remember how to paint. Busk’s homage to the ever-expanding mind of Kirkeby is less an elegy, more a fireworks display — an artwork about pictorial and neurological chaos and complication, and the beauty of tumbling in that atmosphere.

Busk’s practice can go no further than the ecstasy of Mand Falder IV. He is at the limit of what a picture can be. Thus, in Hold Your Own, a suite of small to metre-tall paintings and two monochromatic lithographs show what happens next. The outcasts, cavemen, angels and animal hybrids of these works are subjects who have followed Busk throughout his life as an artist, along with the wrought, suggestive spaces — cold caves, blasted expanses or vertiginous peaks — that they occupy. In these new paintings, Busk captures the porousness between figure and ground, the bleed between humanity and everything it leaches from the natural world, with a delicacy of pattern and layering learned in part from his prolonged dive into collage over the past years. A desire to thicken the universe brought him to his material exploration, and it is the same impulse that has now brought him back to pure painting. Returning to the figure here, to directness, to nimbleness, and to angst at a softer register, Busk’s careerlong wrestling match with the weight of the body and what it can do here returns, weightless and astringent, as a dance.

Peter Linde Busk (b. 1973, Copenhagen) studied between 2002 and 2009 at the Slade School of Art, London; Hunter College, New York; the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (under Peter Doig); and the Royal Academy, London. In the past decade he has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at the Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, Sweden; GL Strand, Copenhagen; and the Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Holstebro, Denmark; in addition to solo and group exhibitions at the Soane Museum and Saatchi Gallery, London; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Studio Voltaire at BolteLang, Zurich; Derek Eller Gallery and the Hole, New York; Monitor, Rome; and Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen. Busk participated in Josh Lilley’s first show in 2009, Hold Your Own will be his third monographic exhibition with the gallery.