The work of artist Kasper Sonne revolves around conceptual strategies, invoked with a certain sense of poetics, melancholia and doubt. Sonne explores how individual and cultural references influence the way we read the world around us, and how meaning is determined by the viewer’s own active construction. By questioning the conventionally adopted symbol values and culturally dictated “truths”, Sonne suggest that if the very things that we take for granted are merely based on a cultural decision, it means that we can also decide for them to mean something else.

Kasper Sonne treats language as an artistic material through which he questions the idea of transferring or mirroring information. Language might originally have been conceived in order to transcend boundaries, to unify and to include - but as often it serves as a tool to control, confine and ultimately to exclude. Sonne’s artistic vocabulary is therefore full of contradictions and negations that allude to the creation of alternative realities, within the notion of right and wrong. In his work language becomes a way of remembering, of reflecting and refracting events: “words that become pictures” and “pictures that become words.”

The use of industrial materials and geometric shapes serves as ready-mades to Sonne. The machine-made materials and perfect geometric shapes are, however, constantly contrasted by human traces and organic imperfections and where material and form makes the work appear cold, hard and anonymous, it’s degraded surfaces and traces of destruction renders it personal, fragile, sensual and poetic. Minimal in their expression as well as in their aesthetics, Sonne’s work always only represent the transformation of an object, not its fixed origin or end. And as he keeps deconstructing any apparent order or clear syntax that the works may suggest, uncertainty and possible misunderstandings of the communicated is produced, thereby leaving the work open to subjective interpretation.

Kasper Sonne (b. 1974 in Copenhagen, Denmark) holds a BA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation. He has exhibited widely at institutions and galleries internationally, including Palais de Tokyo, Paris, SAPS museum, Mexico City, SALTS, Basel, Den Frie - Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Primo Piano, Paris, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, White Box, New York, Seventeen Gallery, London, The Hole, New York, Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna and his work has been featured in magazines such as Artforum, Art In America and Flash Art. He lives and works in New York.