Artlink is pleased to present the solo exhibition Consilience by Mille Guldbeck.

This solo exhibition explores how color, shape, light, and placement effect perception. Minimal and conceptual approaches such as pairing, seriality, pattern, and repetition create abstract representations of how artist Mille Guldbeck experiences the world. The work is fueled by personal experiences of landscape, creating images that are conjured from sensory observations and memory.

Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, September 7th from 5-8 pm!

Artist Statement

The notion of the sublime, as contraposed with the realities of the term within the art historical dialogue, becomes a proxy that embodies the landscape as an expanded form. My work takes an ontological approach to the landscape’s relationship to environmental and historical discourses. Either through a series of fragmentary glimpses of nature presented in diptych panels or large mixed media meditations on the atmosphere around us, our relationship with these changing paradigms is meant to erode the limiting boundaries of the conception of natural space and explore the nuanced vastness of our surroundings. From another perspective, the work presents itself as a reflective exercise of the ways in which Covid -19 has pushed our social discourse to discuss and embrace the exterior space as an elemental part of the human psyche, supported by the presentation of elements that allow readings that travel between multiple relational spheres, constructs and the individual. 

I have long felt that the world becomes valuable to us because of the attention we pay to it; attention can translate into appreciation. Noteworthy is a quote from artist Frederick Franck: “I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start to draw an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is.” My love of basic natural science leads me to study histories of how our perceptions of space and color are formed and interpreted. Inspired by the story of a young scientist who wished to record all the colors of blue that he could see, I began to think about how our perceptions of the world around us are always flawed. No matter how sophisticated observational "tools" become, the experience we attempt to relay to others is always deficient in some respects.I aim to depict alternate realities built by human error and misunderstanding as they apply to the natural world and natural systems. They are alternate realities informed by (mis)observation; both my own and that of others; images that seek to embody the desire to shape and understand the world around them.

About the Artist

Mille Guldbeck earned her MFA from the University of Iowa and attended the Jutland Art Academy (Det Jyske Kunstakademi) in Denmark. She holds B.A. degrees in anthropology (University of Aarhus) and Liberal Education (Columbia College, Chicago), and held a postgraduate Fellowship (Academy of Fine Arts) at the University of Zagreb. Guldbeck was named the Lois Roth Endowment Fellow for 2007 by the Fulbright affiliate American-Scandinavian Foundation (ASF) and was the recipient of an ASF Grant as well as an E.D. Foundation Grant to support her projects. She has been awarded an Iowa Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Award and artist residencies including the Ragdale Foundation, Jentel Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts in the U.S. as well as Grafisk Vaerksted and Hollufgaard International Artist Residencies in Denmark, SIM Akureyri and Reykjavik and Hafnarborg Center for Culture and Art in Iceland and Nelimarkka Museum in Finland in both 2015 and 2017.

Included in both New American Painting and Studio Visit publications, her work can be viewed in public collections in museums such as The Royal Danish Library and the Danish Museum ofPhotographic Art. Work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally including over 43 solo exhibitions with lectures given about her work including Hafnarborg Center for Culture and Art and Akureyri Art Museum in Iceland, Nelimarkka Museum in Finland, the Affordable Art Fair and the Samuel Morse Museum and Historic Site in New York. She is represented by Concept Art Gallery in Pittsburgh and Galleri 5000 in Denmark. Guldbeck is currently Area Head of Painting and Drawing and Professor of Creative Arts Excellence at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.