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A woman walks in circles in the cornfield, while the light slowly transforms from warm and yellowish to cooler blue tones. Gradually, the contours are blurred and the silence is broken by a dog barking in the distance. This scenario, which appears strangely beautiful and at the same time eerie, is part of one of the works in the group exhibition Blå time (eng: Blue hour).Here, the five visual artists in the Danish artist group De Blide relate in different ways to the phenomenon of the blue hour, which is a term for the period around sunset and sunrise.
The blue hour is also known as twilight or dusk and can be considered a borderspace - a both-and and neither-or.
There is something at once mysterious, melancholic, poetic and disturbing about this transitional time, which throughout history has inspired a long line of artists in the fields of literature, film and visual art, among others. In the novel Blue Nights (2011), the American author Joan Didion describes the blue hour as follows:
”You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.”
The blue hour can also be connected to the expression “wolf hour”, which in this context is not the time in the late afternoon when small children are demanding and parents are tired, but as Ingmar Bergman depicts the period in the 1968 film The Hour of the Wolf:
“The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.”
It is the complexity of the concept that has inspired De Blide, and it is reflected in the exhibition - through photography, video, textiles, ceramics and painting - as diverse attempts to capture the fleeting blue hour.
(Text by Helle Fagralid)
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The artist group De Blide was formed in 2021 and consists of the five emerging visual artists: Ditte Johanne Krogh Bertelsen, Emil Kjerrman, Jens Alfred Raahauge, Signe Maria Friis and Rigmor Fischer as well as art historian Helle Fagralid. De Blide has previously exhibited at Kunstforeningen Vordingborg and at the artist-run gallery Plast in Leipzig.
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