Asger Harbou

Redemption comes in the most unlikely of guises and materialities, particularly when arriving in and through paint.

Asger Gjerdevik’s Unplayable Piano is a cycle of paintings running roughly twenty in number. When a series shifts and advances to become a sequence of works, great consequence may follow. It has been my privilege to witness Asger Gjerdevik compose this cycle across the last year. My choice of the verb needs elaboration. The musicality of Unplayable Piano is palpable in the structure and signature of the individual paintings and then across the architecture of the whole cycle through the reprise of given motifs. I have seen Asger prepare and paint a good many of these works, but most often I have seen him sitting in his studio chair before these works in quiet contemplation and holding a conversation with a each painting as it comes into being. Great painters spend more time looking at their work than the time they spend painting a given canvas by a large factor. This is something quite difficult to teach. With Asger Gjerdevik, that quality is a deeply held muscle memory and intuitive.