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THE COLORFUL AFTERMATH OF A VIOLENT STELLAR DEATH
Kunstpakhuset, Ikast, Denmark
21.04.2023 - 04.06.2023
Press release
Laila Svensgaard shows a new series of star portraits, as well as the installation "Death of The Milky Way" in her solo exhibition The Colorful Aftermath of A Violent Stellar Death at Kunstpakhuset. The star portraits are delicate pencil drawings of various supernova remnants, stars that exploded billions of years ago. Svensgaard has chosen to work with supernovae, dead stars, in order to poetically explore our relationship to the starry sky, and the significance it has for us when light pollution and over-illumination of the night sky kills the stars before our eyes.
Svensgaard’s pencil drawings are based on space photographs from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. When space telescopes photograph in space, they photograph the wavelengths, that lie outside the human visible spectrum, in B/W. Subsequently, the B/W photographs are colored and combined into brightly multicolored images. The artist has deconstructed the space photographs back to the original B/W photographs, and drawn them in pencil. Images of stars, that we cannot see from the ground, and which are created for distribution via our screens, thus get a "body" and an insistent presence in Svensgaard's drawings. The absence of the dead stars becomes omnipresent in Svensgaard's drawings.
Photos: Ole Jørgensen, Laila Svensgaard