Eske Rex

Through the years, Danish artist Eske Rex has developed a body of work where practices from architecture, art, design and craft are intertwined and unfolded within sculpture and installation. The works of art stem, despite their clear and ethereal expression, therefore from a more complex origin.

Eske Rex’s works are carried both by a conceptual idea and by the materials and the craftsmanship, and they are decidedly discursive in their analogue and apolitical statements. They examine the effects of force caused by tension between materials and space, in which they are overextended, stretched, split and placed on the verge of collapse. There are no stated explanations – all transfer of information happens on an aesthetic and sensuous level. The traces of craft and the attention to materials sensuously combine the tangible and near with metaphysical, essential and universal matters. Motion is essential in Rex´ works. Even motionless sculptures such as Book II have a shape and a material that animate the surrounding space. The work has a strength which gives it an identity, an own-ness.

With the naked eye, some of Eske Rex’s works are perceived as quivering, through the means of which an inner tension emits a sense of the actual material’s potential. Accordingly, in Unfolded Plank, roughly sawn planks of oak wood have been cut up on the narrow segments and subsequently steamed, after which the open – and now bisected – ends are twisted apart from each other. While the opposite end continues as it had originally extended, this is now visibly altered, in the spot where the twist in the plank’s length manifests this inherent tension in the wood.

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Eske Rex graduated from the Danish Design School in 2008. In 2010, he received the Danish Arts Foundation’s working grant and took part in the exhibition ‘Designers Investigating’ in Øksnehallen, which won an award from the Danish Arts Foundation. In 2011, he took part in MINDCRAFT11 in Milan and exhibited at the Triennale Design Museum, also in Milan. Eske Rex’ works have been exhibited world-wide, including 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanasawa Japan; Den Frie, Copenhagen; Verbeke Foundation, Belgium; MINDCRAFT 17, Milan; Chart Fair, Copenhagen (Galerie Maria Wettergren); Design Miami/Basel; TEFAF Maastricht and PAD Paris/London. In 2015, Eske Rex created a monumental site-specific installation for the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands.