Frères d’Outre-Tombe consists of seven portraits in cast, polished glass. We encounter them at eye level, raised on plinths, sitting a top mirror: clear, anamorphic heads whose features emerge, shift and disappear again as we move around them. The title borrows from François-René de Chateaubriand’s (1848-1841, French writer, politician, diplomat and historian) autobiography, Mémoires d’outre-tombe. For Chateaubriand, time is at once a current of world history and an intimate erosion: names and faces once held dear gradually slip from our memory. Nørgaard’s portraits seem to inhabit precisely this space - between memory’s attempt to hold on and time’s work of dissolution. Nørgaard does not tell us who the seven frères are. But the word brothers carries a particular resonance within his own history. In the 1960s, he was part of the circle around the Experimental Art School (Eks-skolen) and the avowed brotherhood among its artists would prove formative to his artistic life. Today, Nørgaard is among the last remaining members of this circle, making it tempting to imagine the seven portraits as these exact friends and artists collegues.
Text: Galleri Susanne Ottesen