The exhibition opens Thursday 15th of August from 6 - 8 pm

Dannelse 2 is the second exhibition based on Thomas Kvam’s collection of press photographs from European and North American news agencies. The photographs, dating from the 1960s onwards, document school vandalism: blackboards covered in graffiti, classrooms smeared with paint and marker, material destruction, and tagging. From today’s perspective, these actions may seem trivial, but when translated into paintings, different stories emerge.

Just as art students once copied the old masters, like Rembrandt and Velázquez, Thomas Kvam has meticulously painted studies of the vandalism documented in five of these photographs. When Kvam sees the press photo of the principal’s office in Norwich, England, he sees a painting. Through the hole in the door, we see the school’s filing cabinet with black marker ink running down it, as if it were taken straight from the art history of abstract expressionism, signed by Robert Motherwell or Cy Twombly. Other paintings evoke an interface between the gestures of vandalism and the journalists’ pen notes on the back of the press photos. In the paintings of school blackboards, the eraser smudges and chalk traces create a sense of depth and history behind the energetic lines of the tags.

Every paint stain, every marker stroke, and every drip are rendered to the point where the paintings become a series of meditations. Over time, the anonymous and forgotten events, born out of raw frustration and destructive creativity, rise to the surface of the painting—expressive and enigmatic.

The exhibition also includes a painting created for the Rantology exhibition at Blomqvist auction house in 2013. The painting did not fit in and is now being publicly displayed for the first time, over ten years later. Just over six months before April 20, 1999, the day of the Columbine massacre, Eric Harris, one of the two killers, submitted a school essay in his English class. It describes the upcoming attack in detail, from weapon choices to tactics, but with one significant difference: the fellow students are deadly aliens that must be exterminated. The painting’s subject is the final page of the essay, but the story itself is omitted. Only the teacher’s notes and well-meaning corrections can be read, before the final judgment, the grade, remains on the canvas.

When you see this painting today, it feels like looking at a dark and distorted reflection of the other paintings’ innocent vandalism. There is, of course, a difference between innocent rebellion against the school system and a teacher’s failure to understand the seriousness behind an essay, for the wound that opens cuts deeper. These paintings are scenes where both beauty and tragedy meet. What dominates is up to each viewer to decide.

Thomas Kvam Lochau, Østerrike