Born 1967 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Lives in Copenhagen, DK.
For many years, Mads Gamdrup worked on photos of desolate, barren landscapes from all over the world, where the natural setting can be regarded as a conceptualisation of the landscape. Now, however, his focus has shifted, following a long study of scientific texts. Recently he began elaborating on facets of monochrome photography. The photos in the series Monochrome Colour Noise explore the potential of photography, inspired by research on colour metaphysics and based on the colour theories of Newton and Goethe. The colours he uses are from materials he has been collecting for years and consist of the waste, “colour noise” that gets left over in digital scanning of analogue photographs. By means of an exceedingly slow process, on the outer margins of photography, the colours from this palette are presented, from pure colour to pure light, resulting in painterly, brightly shimmering illusory pictorial spaces with a kinship to Mark Rothko’s meditative, immaterial colour fields.
Education
1995–1997 M.F.A., The school for communication and theory, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, DK
1988–1995 The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, DK
Selected bibliography
Mette Sandbye and Lisbeth Bonde: Manual til dansk kunst, Gyldendahl, Copenhagen, 2006
Mette Sandbye: Dansk fotografihistorie, Gyldendahl, Copenhagen, 2004
Horacio Fernández: Moonlight – on Mads Gamdrup, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Málaga, 2003
Terrie Sultan: “Anywhere, Everywhere, Nowhere”, Renunciation, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, 2002