Ud!Ude.Hjem!, Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen, 2006.

In his project currently showing at Thorvaldsen’s Museum, Søren Lose’s engagement with history delivers the focus – the long expanse of time stretching back to ancient Rome and the less lengthy period reaching back to Thorvaldsen and the Danish Golden Age. The project consists of an intervention in the museum’s permanent display of Thorvaldsen’s painting collection. Lose hangs his own photographic works cheek by jowl with those paintings. Overarchingly, the project addresses the issue of the relationship between painting and photography, which was in fact invented in Thorvaldsen’s lifetime, more precisely in 1837, but which for many years was not recognized as art. As Lundbye framed it in the year of Thorvaldsen’s death, just seven years after the invention: …I feel that the daguerreotype fails to satisfy…and…[that] a landscape in a mirror, whatever its grace, [is] hard, embroidered, not to mention how very rare it is to find a view which thus extracted can form a whole [diary entry for 2 September 1844]. Reservations in respect of the photographic medium’s artistic potential had long maintained a tenacious grip, but are history today. The exhibition showing at Thorvaldsen’s Museum is in itself an indication that today photography enjoys the same status as painting, sculpture and other established genres.

Read full text by curator William Gelius

VIDEOROMA, DVD, 8:26 min/loop, 2006.