Hans Alf Gallery

For this new exhibithion, ”A Dark Story in White" Haugen Sørensen has described his exhibition as follows:

"This exhibition is the result of two years of work where I concentrated on the way in which to work with the clay. I have tried to let the clay become more clay than motif. In any case, what the sculptures recount is important for me because I want to describe the situation we all find ourselves in. 

But the problem is, what we experience here and now is seen through a veil of frightening details while the big picture gets lost. It is this duality that I try to show by modeling the sculptures the way I do.

To sit and fiddle with images made from mud is an activity that man has been doing since the dawn of time. We have always created imagery of our thoughts and actions —  I wanted to tell a dark story in white. The white glaze stands in contrast to the motif: an image of our world that is violent and filled with horror. We see it, or sense it, but cannot accommodate the realism from the point where we stand. They are events that take place around us and with us, and that are hanging over us like a cloud in all their incomprehensibility.

Since each of us perceives the world differently, I have tried to let the figures exist openly between clay and picture, so that each observer can form his or her own motif. Just like when I was a young boy on holiday with a peasant family and I had to buy a gift for my mother, who had her birthday in the middle of the holiday and I went to the shop and chose a small porcelain vase. The writing on it was Greetings from Endelave - made in China. For me, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I hope that in what I have created here, each one of you will find your own image."

Jorgen Haugen Sorensen, 2016. 

Photographer Eli Benveniste

See photos from Hans Alf Gallery here