MONOCHROME : Group show

Bricks Gallery is pleased to present MONOCHROME, a group exhibition featuring works by Adele Rannes, Galina Munroe, Inka Bell, Jakob Oksbjerg, Jakob Steen, Jon Erik Nyholm, Loren Erdrich, Louise Foo, Martha Hviid, Martha Skou, Mathias Malling Mortensen, Mikkel Ørsted, Morten Modin, Morten Plesner, Peter Larsen, Rune Brink, Simona Popovic, Sune Christiansen and Theis Wendt, with an opening reception on Friday, June 12 from 18-20.

What happens when a painter abandons the full spectrum, a sculptor commits entirely to black, or a photographer hands themselves over to a single, unexpected tone? 

MONOCHROME started out as a straightforward challenge, a group of artists each asked to work with just one dominant colour. Simple in theory. Anything but in practice.

While some of the participating artists have always worked this way, others took it on as a willing constraint, a chance to strip things back and see what remains when colour stops competing with itself. What emerges, across the whole show, is just how much a single colour can hold: how charged it becomes, how physical, how surprisingly emotional.

The nineteen works are very different from one another in material, colour, and approach, and yet each one finds its way to monochrome on its own terms.

Inka Bell's paper relief seems to change as you move around it. What looks completely black from one angle gradually reveals itself as something far more varied, greys, silvers, near-whites appearing and dissolving depending on where you stand. Mathias Malling Mortensen arrives at a similar kind of depth from the opposite direction. His paper-cut is built entirely from Prussian blue, one of the oldest synthetic pigments in existence and still one of the most intense colours on the planet. Frame, background, and the paper-cut itself each carry their own shade, but all within the same blue register, pulling you in until colour stops being something you observe and becomes something you're inside.

Morten Plesner uses no pigment at all. Only fire. Scorch marks and carbonised edges carry all the tonal variation, each one a trace of something that has already happened. The work is quiet, but what it points to isn't. Simona Popovic's interior scenes are quiet in a different way. Warm light usually finds its way in through windows and doors in her work, but here that familiar glow has gone, replaced by a lilac tone that turns the whole atmosphere into something dreamlike and oddly melancholy.

Galina Munroe's large painting extends its many yellow tones across a draped cloth, scattered objects and even the hand-painted frame itself. Nothing escapes the colour. Peter Larsen also works in yellow but takes a different route, where figures from different eras are gathered into one yellow field until the image feels less like a painting and more like something from a distant memory.

These are just a handful of the works on show, but across all nineteen contributions, the same quiet discovery keeps resurfacing: that when you take colour away, something else comes to life. The minimal techno producers of Detroit discovered it decades ago; take enough away and what remains becomes more powerful, not less. Richie Hawtin's Minus label even named a record after the idea, Minimize to Maximize. MONOCHROME  works in this same way, because when one removes colour, other things start to show up more clearly, such as rhythm, textures, shadows, silence.

Text and curation by Morten Halborg-Møller.

The opening reception is sponsored by Nørrebrew, offering organic beers and non-alcoholic drinks.