PULSE. Erland Knudssøn Madsen

January 16 – August 28, 2016

Danish sculptor Erland Knudssøn Madsen was born 1942. He gradually developed his personal expression being in-between figurative and abstract, with weight on the latter. His artistic work is on one hand very specific and someway outside of tendencies in Danish sculptural art. His art has the character of artistic basic research. This artist’s visual language gives visual form and language to an inner world of thoughts, life, the indescribable pulse in a tiny leaf or the human mind. This means that he is not working with the viewable world as a motive, although there are inspiration and different reference to it. 

A specific aspect is Erland Knudssøn Madsen's use of physical materials. He seems to be very ”attentive” in relation to the narrative possibilities of each material. In each art work he finds the delicate balance between the material’s own characters - and hereby it contribution to narrative, the subject in focus and the form he chooses to give it. During the recent two centuries he worked with laminated wood, finer, concrete, nylon and different metal, combined with paint and other treatment of the surfaces.  By these choices of materials he moves the understanding of what a sculpture can be, how it look, and this counts for his reliefs as well as the more free standing sculpture. 

New reliefs and sculptures
During 2015 Erland Knudssøn Madsen worked intensely to crate seven new art works, supported financially by National Danish Visual Art Funds. Uniting for these new reliefs and sculptures is his concern for the fragility in the world and in life in general. The artist choose the butterfly as a visual symbol for this balance between life and dead as their vulnerability at the same time frighten and fascinate us. New and older art works are exhibited in 10 in-door exhibition rooms and in addition examples of his so-called ”Cloud Measurers” are on display outside the building and others in one of our inner yards.