In the window of Avlskarl Gallery hangs a handwritten poster with letters sprawling across brown wrapping paper: “Finn Reinbothe: More Sad Love Songs (on a grey background),” followed by some dates. The poster looks strangely makeshift and DIY here amidst the neat and tidy affluence of Copenhagen’s city centre, but it is fortunate that it’s there. On its opening day, Reinbothe’s exhibition had not been announced on social media or on the gallery’s website, and had the latter not been subsequently updated, this silence might’ve seemed intentional.
Of course, there are no texts accompanying the exhibition either, and yet: at the back of the premises, no less than five A4 printouts are on the wall, framed and on display. In perfect International Art English, they speak of exhibitions that might very well be Reinbothe’s but are not. The original artist names have been crossed out in black marker – I can just make out that one of them took place at the Gagosian in Basel – and instead Reinbothe has added his own. We sense that the joke is on us.
The most dominant type of work found in the show shares the same sense of absence. Five fields are marked out on the gallery walls using different kinds of pastel-coloured plastic string, indicating where paintings could have hung. And perhaps five such paintings actually exist: next to each field hangs a tea towel on which someone has wiped paint from their hands. I am reminded of a police cordon around a crime scene, the tea towels acting as bloodied proof that something has taken place.
A smaller, framed work – a list of translations of military terms – evokes similar associations of violence. An ink drawing is superimposed on the typewritten list, specifically, Rubens’s The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618), a mythic story of an abduction. A teddy bear, also smeared in paint, hangs from a wire from the ceiling like a sad reminder of how war and violence also affect children.
Throughout the exhibition, jewellery and military decorations are attached to tea towels, teddy bears, and installations of film screens and plastic cans, speaking eloquently of the sheer perversity of medals being awarded for wars where civilians are killed and raped. People adorn themselves with awards and decorations, a practice both vain and strangely childish, as if it were all just some kind of game.
It is sometimes said of classical painting that the real art is in knowing when to stop, putting aside the brush at the point when the tension in the picture is most evident. The same could be said of Reinbothe’s absent works. Bristling with unfulfilled potential, they are quite sexy and yet heavily laden with violence. Like a crime scene or a mass grave after the war, where forensics and gallery visitors must now set about solving the mystery.
Is this an anti-war exhibition or a gimmick of institutional critique? Perhaps it is both, rather like when a previously experimental musician suddenly surprises everyone by breaking out in a protest song. I have a soft spot for that kind of sudden show of vulnerability.
