'The Enchanted Wood'
A room installation by Derek Curtis

Article by Henrik Broch-Lips

The exhibition space Spanien 19C is one of the few places that has survived the clean-up by smoothly polished high culture and commercialism of the smouldering underground environment in Arhus.

Here in the old gasworks area we can find lavish, philanthropic art, thanks to some voluntary help and an annual grant of 50,000 kroner in municipal support.

Without this contribution, it would be impossible to attract artists such as Derek Curtis from London to Arhus.

We are given the opportunity to enter the 37 year-old Englishman's reduction of nature into artificial, kitsch constructions in the small, unpretentious store-room in the middle of the harbour area. We enter the enchanted wood with plush animals and hand-knitted natural scenery in a complete installation.

With plastic grass on the floor, red brick wallpaper and a yellow-green forest motif, it consists of small tableaux in which the artificial animals express their perverse urges.

The suggestive idea of bringing nature indoors was imported by Derek Curtis from his academy years in Germany.

Bizarre slaughter

In Prince Charming, an alcoholic panda is having a day out in the woods. Accompanied by a Panda porno magazine and some local German beer, the grubby bear is in the process of ruining its reputation with the World Wildlife Fund.

Petty bourgeois problems don't interest the animals' protectors.

The tableau with the pompous title: The Brothers Grimm's lost manuscript (1854): After Bosch is by far the most bizarre exhibit. Here the cat from the well-known children's story The town musicians from Bremen is carrying out a massacre of the three other animal figures with a German-made Bosch chainsaw. The donkey's head has been brutally severed, the dog has been sawn in half and the chicken has been strung up.

Derek Curtis plays a humorous game with the Grimm brothers' fascination with the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who painted demonic motifs from hell.

In this grotesque manner, Curtis mixes cultural history and chance linguistic connections into a surprising new cocktail.

Clear a few rooms

In the same way, curious linguistic links also form the background for Derek Curtis' shining copies of wallpaper painted with enamel paint on aluminium. The pictures 'After Rauschenberg' are inspired by the coincidence between the famous American painter Rauschenberg and the name of a small German town.

It is here that they produce the wallpaper that Curtis uses in his subtle art.

It is extremely annoying that there is only room for a single example of this transformation of low-brow copies of wallpaper into highly polished art. It would have been wonderful if the collective behind the exhibition at Spanien 19C had given Curtis the necessary space for these highly entertaining representations of factory-made impressions of nature.

Clear some space and get rid of your old works, electric racetracks and computer junk and give the artists who accept the modest conditions in the harbour more space to unfold themselves.

It won't break the budget.

In return, I'm sure that many more people will make their way to Spanien 19C.