Kristian Touborg
Strange Attraction
26 June - 18 July 2015


"Even before I was old enough to speak, I remember catching tadpoles at the large lake by my grandparent's house. At this spot, where the well-lit surburbian bike lanes met the untamed nature, I was and still am strangely attracted to what goes on under the waters' surface."

The young Danish painter Kristian Touborg (1987) shows large paintings and elaborate installations with water, seaweed and small aquatic animals at his solo exhibition Strange Atttaction. The paintings all refer to Touborg's early childhood memories of mesmerizing water surfaces and have no other elements than the hypnotic pattern of the water and its organic reflections. Though he carefully avoids mentioning historic paintings with similar motifs, Touborg is well aware of this context, and he offers a perfected, pursuasive and very distinct take on this genre.

The installations are wall-mounted and almost two-dimensional water tanks. Between two layers of glass Toubor a soup of lake water – colored either green, blue, red or purple – and a portion of seaweed, mosquito larvae, daphnia and other animals are captured. Each water tank is suspended three to four inches from the wall in two heavy duty cargo straps and lit from behind with a long LED-lamp. The unshapely content of the water tank changes entirely in this setting that results in a highly geometric and almost futuristic statement.

Starring at the water never gets old, and Touborg reminds us why.