Sergej Jensen’s work draws upon a diverse array of materials and formal references. His practice highlights seemingly incidental details, with his muted palette and gestural mark-making—whether applied in paint or stained with bleach—drawing attention as much to negative space as to defined forms.

The paintings invoke a tradition of high art, adopting its conventions while removing or emptying out its symbolic or expressive aspirations. They depict poetic and melancholic allegorical treescapes, blending influences from Renaissance, Romantic, and Modernist styles (from Joachim Patinir and Albert Pinkham Ryder to Francis Picabia). These references are rendered with a technique resembling tempera or fresco painting, using translucent pigment applied in thin layers. Jensen’s works heighten visual perception, drawing attention to the mundane details of the surrounding world and expanding our understanding of how images, in all their forms, imprint themselves on the visual unconscious.

At a time when many histories are mined through digital networks, Classic stands apart by retaining the immediacy and meta-mentality we associate with contemporary life, while simultaneously producing an analog effect. If to be classic is, in a sense, to be timeless, these works make a quiet yet compelling appeal: How can anything belong to a time other than the present?

Sergej Jensen (b. 1973, Maglegaard, Denmark) lives and works in New York. His solo exhibitions include Le Consortium, Dijon; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; MoMA PS1, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt; and Aspen Art Museum, Aspen. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.