COPENHAGEN.- Sergej Jensen is born in Denmark in 1973. He grew up in Germany and went to art school there. Today he lives and works in Berlin and New York. Despite the Danish roots and the international recognition he has not yet had a solo exhibition at a Danish museum. From 13 October, visitors to SMK can experience a series of his new paintings in x-rummet – SMK's experimental venue for contemporary art. The exhibition in x-rummet constitutes Sergej Jensen’s first solo exhibition at a Danish museum.

Silkscreens and clumsy allegories
Danish-born Sergej Jensen is an internationally acclaimed artist known for his unconventional approach to painting. Recently Sergej Jensen has worked with figurative subject matter sourced from widely different art historical periods and schools, ranging from the Renaissance, to Romanticism, to early modernism - sometimes all at once. Like some of Jensen’s earlier monochrome and ‘abstract’ paintings, his figurative paintings reference motifs that are at times recognizable and familiar.

In his figurative paintings, the subject matter comes either one-to-one from the original source or elements from historic and photographic motifs are patched together in new constellations and clumsy allegories. With this project-and-paint method of stringing elements together, these paintings are not unlike his stitched up abstract compositions. Some paintings in this exhibition include scenes and buildings in Copenhagen. In a series of black-and-white silkscreens Jensen has printed photographs of his own paintings on scaled-down canvases. Here, his own sampled works become the original source material for a kind of second mode of representation.

Sergej Jensen was born in 1973 in Denmark. Jensen studied fine art at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt and lives and works in Berlin. In recent years he has had solo exhibitions at e.g. Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, MoMA PS1 in New York, Kunsthalle Portikus in Frankfurt and Aspen Art Museum in Colorado. His works are part of the permanent collections at institutions such as Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York.