Cosmopolitan Super Fruits

Nourishment – the life-enhancing properties of fruit and the visual and intellectual sustenance of art – is a connecting theme. So too is seduction – fruit’s ingenious ways of drawing attention to itself in order to disseminate its seed, versus the artist’s deployment of brushmark and colour to carry, Trojan horse-like, a barrage of ideas. In this regard, fruit, a traditional subject in art history carrying intimations of life’s brevity in the genre of still life painting, and a longstanding motif in Kørner’s art, is deployed to raise questions that place the viewer/consumer squarely at their centre.

Unified by bright white grounds, the works range through formats and scales, travelling through art historical tropes and pictorial languages. Kørner, at times, opens up an illusionistic perspectival space; at others, he keeps the action close to the surface, layered or scroll-like. Here, consumerist expectations of there being, for example, strawberries, watermelon or grapes at perfect ripeness anywhere in the world at any time of the year gives rise, on the one hand, to heady displays of the perpetually sweet, tasty and desirable and, on the other, an acknowledgement of the high-tech and carbon-heavy methods needed to fulfil these demands.

Kørner’s Problems – oval or egg-like forms that appear in his paintings and, in this exhibition, as sculptures – allude not to specific problems per se but to the nature of problems as they emerge and are comprehended in the world. They act as metaphors for the human condition. For this exhibition, a number of sumptuously coloured glass sculptures might be considered Fruit Problems, giving physical form to the themes of transportation, consumerism and globalism that run throughout the paintings on view.

As ever, Kørner’s work encourages musings that can seem contradictory: on the one hand it is apparently open and easy-going, on the other it seems freighted with awkward questions alluding to specific world events.