Exhibition: Shark Smiles and Sunflowers

A bunch of sunflowers plucked from a neighbour’s flower bed. The sensuous shadows of marble sculptures in a garden at sunset. The heady scent of a lilac tree on a late summer’s evening.

Shark Smiles and Sunflowers, Danish artist Anders Scrmn Meisner’s first solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, presents a playful new series of paintings that explore the emotional value of objects and the power of visual storytelling.

The titles of Meisner’s works are almost as important as the paintings themselves. He builds his compositions from the lines that he jots down in his notebooks and then paints the titles on to the sidebar of his completed canvases. As such, the viewer encounters the work from two perspectives: first as a purely visual image and then with a written prompt that offers a clue into the story that Meisner is imagining. A seemingly simple painting of a vase of sunflowers, for example, takes on another layer of meaning when we read the title, I Stole For You Last Night while Lilac Fragrance, My Blue Eyes, Your Full Moon imbues the painting of a feathery blue, leafy tree with a sense of romantic nostalgia.

To Meisner, these works are all ‘giant postcards of affection.’ They capture specific moments in time, memories of an emotional experience and physical connections. The flat, graphic style of the imagery plays into the postcard aesthetic while the vivid colour palette and Pointillist-inspired backdrops evoke a youthful, summery mood.

At the same time, Mesiner takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to such nostalgia. View From Expensive Holiday, for example, depicts a nonspecific sunny, seaside landscape while Chiesa La Domenica (Italian for church on Sunday) features a bunch of flowers in a Ferrari-branded pot. Both of these works knowingly play on stereotypes, inviting the viewer into the joke, while the flattened perspective and addition of slightly surreal or unexpected elements, such as the two orange suns in View From Expensive Holiday or the pink high-heels in Chiesa La Domenica, create a sense of intrigue. As Meisner puts it, ‘I am just starting the story. The rest is left to the viewer’s imagination.’

It is this playfulness that makes Meisner’s work so captivating. Each image is simultaneously familiar and open-ended, filled with endless potential. Just as Meisner takes pleasure in allowing himself to paint whatever he feels like, ‘it doesn’t matter how weird it is,’ his work invites us to let our minds wander and dream.