Stalke Galleri was pleased to invite guests to the opening reception on Friday, January 11, 2002.

The exhibition featured works by three visual artists: William Anthony (USA), Dirk Larsen (England), and Pöter Røssel (Denmark). The exhibition ran until February 22.

Dirk Larsen (England)

“I never had certainty about which motive would ‘emerge’ until it shifted direction toward something else, merely leaving behind a sense of its arrival,” Dirk Larsen said of his meticulously crafted and enchantingly alienated staged paintings.

In his paintings, Dirk Larsen turned both up and down on the world: partly dark, partly playful, and partly burlesque—where the fixation was less on a Freudian interpretation of the subconscious and the surreal, and more on the simple, static act of telling a story. In Young Burg-lars, alienated, severed heads were on their way to their first showdown, while in Aftermath Friends, the characters clung to cohesion in a time of opposition.
Fortunately, “Dirk Larsen” also wrote stories—for a confident and prosaic audience invited into his fantastically skewed, Brothers Grimm–like world.

Dirk Larsen was born in Denmark in 1951 and was educated at the Royal College of Art in London. He moved to Holland in 1978, where part of his career—as half of the performance duo Reindeer Work—brought him into close contact with artist Joseph Beuys. From 1982 onward, Dirk Larsen lived and painted in England and regularly exhibited across Europe.

William Anthony (USA)

“Strangely enough,” William Anthony stated, “I was a product of my own students.”
For a long time, he taught a class in which he began by having students draw “from a model.” Many of the students produced hesitant and awkward drawings, as if there were an inherent insecurity among them. He perceived their “style,” their “expression,” as a result of this insecurity—mistakes that influenced and inspired him.

Instead of correcting the students’ mistakes, he encouraged them to further explore these personal, skewed expressions. Over time, he adopted his students’ grotesque and unique expressions to create a style he proudly called his own. Semester after semester, he adjusted and refined this personal style. The students and the school administration were enthusiastic about the development, and after a final semester, his students graduated with top grades—everyone was satisfied.

William Anthony’s works were represented in numerous museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Ludwig Museum (Cologne), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the Yale University Art Museum, among others.

Peter Rössel (Denmark)

Since the early 1980s, Peter Rössel had occupied a central position in Danish art and had consistently worked with his foundational figurative visual language throughout the 1990s.
Like the two other artists, Peter Rössel’s works possessed a distinctly personal figurative language, often featuring a mix of elements from cartoons, advertisements, and pop imagery.

Peter Røssel’s works were represented in significant public collections, including Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, The National Gallery of Denmark, The Royal Collection of Graphic Art, and Horsens Kunstmuseum.

Stalke Galleri exhibition archive from 1987