Torben Ribe’s artistic work examines the interrelationship of everyday-life aesthetics with the autonomous abstract artwork. Using painting as his subject of endless scrutiny, Ribe is interested in how abstract, commercial, and private pictures are influenced by the mutual relationship between them and how far this influence extends. Torben Ribe combines painting with ephemera from consumer culture and utilitarian objects or furniture—pizza menus, a radiator, a coffee pot, a ventilator, a wall socket—to produce idiosyncratic assemblages that evoke domestic spaces.
Torben Ribe (b. 1978) is educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. He has exhibited widely in Denmark and abroad with several solo and group exhibitions, including Pizza is God at NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf, Cool, Calm and Collected at AROS, Aarhus, Lean Issues at Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto, Indoor Paintings at David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, Neighbours at CAR drde, Bologna as well as Landscapes and Fruit at Galerie Hussenot, Paris. Lately, he has exhibited at Ringsted Galleriet, Ringsted with Maiken Bent.
Leverpostejsdrømme
(Matjesfilet), 2024
Dreams of
Liver Pâté (Matjes Herring)
Acrylic and
inkjet on canvas
55 x45 cm
Liver Pâté is a typical Danish food, supposedly introduced from France in the second half of the 19th century. It was mass-produced and consequently cheap and popular, in contrast to its former status as a delicacy reserved for the upper classes. In a series of paintings displayed in the exhibition, the artist has blended paints with different types of liver pâté, producing chromatic variations and varying textures within a monochrome ensemble. Like a slice of bread upon which everyone composes a design of varying visual impact with their spread of choice, bringing together beetroot, cucumber etc, the painter chooses to introduce Asger Jorn-branded merchandise. These collages are a half-way house between culinary traditions and museum shops, between rural cuisine and the global art world.
