Troels Worsel – Untitled (1983)

Louisiana poster with the work, Untitled (1983), by the Danish artist, Troels Wörsel (1950-2018). The poster was published in connection with Louisiana's exhibition of Wörsel in 2020 in the series, Louisiana on Paper. Wörsel is represented in the Louisiana collection by a number of paintings and at Wörsel's death there were a large number of works on paper in his studio, the majority never exhibited before.

Where contemporary art in the period from the 1990s onwards has in many ways reflected on its own activist, social and viewer-engaging potential, Wörsel did not contribute to such agendas. What we encounter in Wörsel's works exists in a universe where art's own rules apply.

For Wörsel, we must think exactly what we want about the works, but for him art was simply something other than 'lived life'. Social life and life outside the studio play virtually no role in his pictures. A sign here and a sketch of a town plan there, otherwise nothing.

In the absence of references based on life experiences, the material is imbued with an unstoppable appetite for all that is linguistic in art. The works constitute a gigantic laboratory of what affects the creation of an image.

A mystery of a kind and at the same time an energetic and all-absorbing doing and loading with the material. A world on one plane, but right there, Wörsel stood unhindered on the shoulders of the old masters, cooking with all the ingredients and handling the tools for making art. It is precisely in the virtuoso display that one senses the artist's conversations with the time before his own.