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Tips & Picks Directory
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Simone Cappa
 Minimalist artist John Gesager Nielsen’s oveture are a tribute to the legacy of sculpture and engineering as well as to its visionary union of art and nature. Nielsen’s questioning of the conventional attitudes of art and culture does not stop with the creation of objects and images; he is committed to exploring of attitudes and ideas as a critical component of his work. Nielsen has been creating evocative figurative and abstract sculpture for many years. An earnest devotee to the human condition, he renders both Plexiglas, and metal in an elongated, mannerist style. Nielsen who is Danish-born, and now based in Norway uses his sculptures to grapple with emotions fundamental to interpersonal relationships, from passion and desire, to loneliness and love. His abstracted figure sculptures depict individuals and couples running, standing, kneeling, and embracing each other—each work possessing a sense of life and movement that seems to belie the static nature of sculpture.
The artist’s recent work in Plexiglas further highlight his astonishing capability to create figurative sculpture that transforms human bodies into an elongated, aesthetical form. His sculptures depicting couples describe feelings such as love, passion and erotism. They portray perfect unity and harmony juxtaposed with a struggle for domination and independence. Nielsen’s haunting, poetic—even anguished images could be described as perfect expressions of the way in which human figures form relationships with one another in space. Certain pieces (Confidence for instance) could also been seen as symbols of human fortitude. Though the form is heavy and rooted to the ground, each part of the sculpture echoes two bodies rising up, determined to stand up straight regardless of any adversity they may encounter.
Despite the consistent use of metal or plexiglas throughout Nielsen’s work he is more varied than could be assumed— it can be playful, sensual and even devoutly tender. Volumes of bodies are scattered throughout his overture; linked through a network of connected points and faceted planes. In another series, Toward summit the artist highlights his innately diverse nature: tentative of surface and awkward in description, this series sharpens one's sense of Nielsen’s developing powers, not only in his capacity for emotional depth and surface variety, but also in terms of compositional power. In addition to revealing how people feel on the inside, he captures the exterior with a painterly surface marked by traces of the artist’s hand.
The viewer can't help being powerfully struck by Nielsen’s extreme openness to a plethora of visual influences, from Giacometti and Picasso to Lipchitz, Laurens and Brancusi, not to mention more traditional modes of European sculpture. His work is also about myth, meaning and movement. Combining the great cross-cultural tales and themes of humanity with the technical skill of the sculptural masters, his work aims to capture the defining moment when timeless storytelling, profound significance, and realistic bodily movement intersect.
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