Gallery Poulsen 20
Presenting our 20th Anniversary Exhibition
18 August - 9 September
Opening Reception: Friday, August 18th from 17.00 to 20.00
It is with immense pleasure and pride that I invite you to Gallery Poulsen 20, our large annual summer exhibition, which this year marks nothing less than my 20th anniversary! True to form I have invited a cornucopia of talented artists, old acquaintances as well as new faces, to exhibit their brand-new, diverse, and wide-ranging works in this extraordinary anniversary exhibition.
Time disappears like sand through your fingers and it’s hard to believe that it has now been twenty years since I founded Gallery Poulsen with its first exhibition in the basement of my townhouse in Herning, Jutland in 2003. In the beginning, the artistic focus was primarily centered around Danish artists, but I quickly realized that if I were to find my place in this world, I would have to look towards the international art scene. Therefore, I left Herning for Copenhagen in 2005 and after a trip to the Venice Biennale in 2007 my first international contact was established and the inaugural exhibition, featuring paintings with imagery of American superheroes, in my first Copenhagen-based gallery, became a reality. Ironically, it would later go to show that the American influence the superheroes paved the way for would become synonymous with Gallery Poulsen.
After two years and an international financial crisis, 2010 became a significant year that would come to set the tone for the gallery’s future endeavors. In addition to a relocation to the industrial neighborhood of The Meatpacking District on Vesterbro, the part of Copenhagen we still call home today, 2010 was also the first year I took the trip across the Atlantic to Brooklyn, New York with the purpose of visiting new and exciting American artists in their respective studios and invite them to exhibit their works back home in Denmark. The result of this expedition and search for non-Danish artists that could bring a fresh and versatile perspective to the gallery was the group show The Irascible Assholes, an exhibition that would define a radical shift in the gallery’s profile and aesthetic focus and at the same time introduced us to artists who are still a part of Gallery Poulsen.
With the growing relationship with the art scene of the American East Coast, a necessity to exhibit in New York followed. The dream came to fruition in 2011 with the gallery’s participation at VOLTA New York, which also happened to be our first international art fair presentation ever. The gallery’s connection to New York City grew rapidly in the following years and in 2013 we established contact with the art school New York Academy of Art, an academy we continue to collaborate with closely today and from which we each year recruit young, inspiring, and talented artists to the Gallery Poulsen artist roster.
Since our debut at the international art fairs in 2011 we have participated in numerous American art fairs, in this regard Art Basel Miami Beach is particularly noteworthy. We have been a continuous contributor at Miami Art Week since 2014 and we plan to return this December at Art Miami 2023.
The internationalization of Gallery Poulsen continued, and after the successful 2015 edition of the Pulse New York art fair, the gallery had been introduced to some of the world’s largest and most influential art collections. One sale in particular, which resulted in a cover story in The New York Times, established the gallery on the global art scene as a dynamic space for international and contemporary art of the highest possible standard with a pronounced focus on Hyperrealism and intricate figurative painting. With the gallery’s new and expanded reach, we also started to grow physically and our small gallery space in the central part of The White Meatpacking District was no longer big enough. In 2017 we moved to Staldgade 32 in The Brown Meatpacking District. It’s in this same space I now have the great joy of inviting you to Gallery Poulsen’s 20th anniversary exhibition!
On Staldgade 32 we were now able to present large-scale exhibitions of international museum quality. The new space also allowed us to represent even more artists from all over the world and to establish a global and incredibly loyal group of collectors, something that I’m personally very thankful for and humbled by!
For the anniversary exhibition, the participating artists have not been bound to one specific theme but have been completely free to work with the issues, emotions, narratives, or ideologies that interest them the most right at this moment. Therefore, Gallery Poulsen 20 offers an intimate portrait of the artists’ individual deliberations as well as a personal insight into the contemporary international art scene and its current predispositions.
Come celebrate with me, our artists, collectors, and friends of the gallery at the opening of our 20th anniversary summer show on Friday, August 18th from 17.00 to 20.00 in Gallery Poulsen, Staldgade 32, Copenhagen V. I’m looking forward to seeing all of you at the opening reception where many of the participating international artists are also going to be present.
Best wishes
Morten Poulsen
Participating artists:
Landon Bailey Higgins (US), Jud Bergeron (US), Zhou Chen (CN), Ryan Davis (US),
Santiago Galeas (US), Angela Gram (US), John Jacobsmeyer (US), Adam Miller (US),
Emilia Nurmivaara (FI), Rebecca Orcutt (US),William Powhida (US), Jean-Pierre Roy (US),
Taylor Schultek (US), German Tellez (CO), Lorenzo Tonda (IT), Ben Venom (US), Nicola Verlato (IT),
Jingyi Wang (CN), Jed Webster Smith (US), Martin Wittfooth (CA), and Jiannan Wu (CN)
Gallery Poulsen 20
Presenting our 20th Anniversary Summer Exhibition
18.08.23 – 09.09.23
Opening reception: Friday, August 18th, 17.00 – 20.00
The exhibition presents a wide range of new works from Gallery Poulsen’s international artists.
Please contact the gallery at [email protected] or tel.+ 45 33 33 93 96 for more info
Soft Eyes Art Social at Gallery Poulsen
Gallery Poulsen offers you a unique opportunity to experience our group of international artists in action when we're hosting an afternoon of drawing from life in collaboration with Brooklyn-based Soft Eyes Art Social on Saturday, August 19th from 12.00 - 15.00.
Soft Eyes Art Social was founded by artist Jean-Pierre Roy at the begging of 2023 in Brooklyn, New York. The art social invites you to experience the direct and immediate nature of drawing from real life.
At the drawing session, you are invited to an exclusive "behind the scenes" experience, when the artists interpret the live model in their own unique artistic styles giving us an insight into how art has been created for centuries.
Installation Images
