Galerie Sardine is pleased to present Skin to Skin w. Dog Daisy, the first U.S. solo exhibition by Copenhagen-based artist Frederik Nystrup-Larsen, opening September 16th in our Tribeca space.
The suite of paintings follows Nystrup-Larsen's young son as he begins to walk, observing his first encounters with the landscape surrounding their home in rural Denmark. Flowers, grasses, and the perpetual light of the Nordic summer recur throughout the work, recording this period of discovery through the child's emerging perception of the world and the artist's close observation of it.
The exhibition's title evokes skin-to-skin contact, one of the earliest forms of communication between parent and child, grounded in intimacy, touch, and warmth. Nystrup-Larsen extends this sense of communion to the natural world: his paintings emerge from a sustained closeness to the landscape, where looking becomes a form of contact, an attempt to hold, however provisionally, a natural world too exuberant and immense to protect from change.
For Nystrup-Larsen, painting operates somewhere between image-making and documentation, testing the possibility of recording a landscape while remaining conscious of the inadequacy of its reproduction. His motifs shift between lived phenomena and specimen, souvenir, and relic. Flowers, in particular, carry this tension forward from a long art-historical lineage: their beauty and transience have long served as meditations on the ephemeral nature of the human experience. In Nystrup-Larsen's work, this classical motif acquires a contemporary edge, situating the familiar subject of the flower within a broader instability, one shaped by climate anxiety and collective ecological grief.
Skin to Skin w. Dog Daisy will be on view at Galerie Sardine from September 16 through October 24.
Frederik Nystrup-Larsen (b. 1992 Copenhagen, Denmark) Lives and works in Copenhagen.
Galerie Sardine