Freaky Weather

With the exhibition Freaky Weather, at Solito - Galleria S2, Tanja Nis-Hansen (b. 1988, Denmark) presents a body of work made between 2019 and September 2023. The exhibition examines and challenges the relation between painting and writing, the two core practices of the artist, while also dealing with psychological aspects of the human response to an internal and external environment in disruption.

Through a radical and specific scenography in the exhibition space accentuated by a textual wall painting carrying the cryptic messages Big Burp and Creeping Ulcer, the artist is firstly implying a double-layered reading. The black font is both casual and funny in its swirly shape, yet also dominant and heavy due to its size and colour. Each phrase represents a different pace; one rapid, the other slow. By juxtaposing the two textual statements referring to bodily conditions, Nis-Hansen highlights the different levels of urgency with which we face a crisis.

The use of semiotic elements around and within painting is an ongoing part of Nis-Hansen’s artistic research which can be understood as a fascination for language and writing as well as an inclination to deal with text as ornament. Within the 20^th century the Absurd, Dada and Surrealist movements all came to reinforce the importance of words and language which later, were even more radicalised by groups such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. In painting practices, artists such as Florentine Stettheimer, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte and later Alighiero Boetti, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer all use the power of words to question the practice of art itself and the essence of the world surrounding them within a geopolitical, social, and economic context.  

In the exhibition, Nis-Hansen lets the semiotic wallscape be sporadically interrupted by smaller paintings on canvas, like patches on wounds partly impeding the reading of the text itself. The singular paintings hint towards the surreal as most of the artists’ works do and they offer a variety of interpretations regarding the management of worry when it comes to health and climate, a duo closely interconnected. By treating the paintings as signs, the border between a pictorial and linguistic expression gets blurred and welcomes a negotiation on the role of painting and on how we create meaning.

Along the lines of semiotics, we could claim that the artworks which constitute this exhibition are all letters in one sensical sentence which the artist ends with a big fat dot in the form of an ambivalent love letter in the painting And When I Say “The World” I Mean “My Body” from 2022. Though slightly jolly in its formal appearance, the painting plays with a fatal comparison of being in a sick body and being in a world made sick when it says Dirty, cancerous, radioactive, filthy, mortal and sore, you are all this to me and much more.

Text by Vincent Vanden Bogaard