In his solo show ’Methods of Tilling the Soil’, Albert Grøndahl applies a fictitious anthropological approach. The works investigate nature and human existence as would-be testimonials of a journey; fragments of ”alien matter” reappearing in the fixing bath of the darkroom.
Albert Grøndahl finds his subjects by way of intuition but in this show, he has left behind the traditional printing techniques in favour of new methods to communicate and interpret recorded impressions, including sculpture and the combination of emulsion on leaf silver.
The physical aspect of these prints, and their enhanced dynamics between references and textures, integrate the working process into the motive of each plate, allowing for new, non-reproducable pictorial surfaces. The aim is to transform the photographical method by way of other pictorial strategies, stressing not only the uniqueness of moments ”found” and preserved but also the unique gesture of artistical interpretation.
The mechanical receptiveness of traditional photography thus gives way to a notion of the image – and of the creative mind – as a phenomenological rendezvous of exchanges, cultural and emotional alike. Albert Grøndahl likes to see himself as a ”collector of experiences”, bearing in mind that collecting is in itself a part of the adventure.