Sergej Jensen’s work draws on a wide range of materials and formal references. His practice draws attention to seemingly incidental details, and his muted palette and gestural mark-making, whether applied in paint or stained with bleach, point as much to negative space as to delineated forms. ​

The paintings invoke a tradition of high painting, adopting its conventions but setting apart or emptying out its symbolic or expressive ambitions. They portray poetic and moody allegorical treescapes, in which Renaissance, Romantic or Modernist styles of different sources (from Joachim Patinir to Albert Pinkham Ryder to Frances Picabia), are rendered with a technique resembling tempera or fresco painting, using translucent pigment applied thinly in many layers. They sharpen visual perception, awakening you to the mundane details of the surrounding world and expanding your understanding of the way images of all sorts imprint themselves on the visual unconscious. ​

At a moment when so many histories are mined via digital networks, “Classic” is refreshing in that it retains the immediacy and metamentality that we associate with contemporary life while simultaneously producing an analog affect. If to be classic is in a sense to be timeless, these are works that make a furtive appeal: How can anything belong to a time other than now? ​

​Sergej Jensen (1973, Maglegaard, Denmark) lives and works in New York. 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 in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contem– porary Art, Los Angeles; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. ​