A R T S T A M P . D K

Nikolaj Recke (b. 1969) has, since the mid-1990s, developed a personal approach to video, photography, and installations that challenge our relationship with nature, landscape, and cultural history. His work, often described as "emotional conceptualism" by curator Jacob Lillemose, embodies emotional and poetic connections to the environments he portrays. One example is the work 300 Feet Away From You (2014), where Recke, during a trip across the USA, took photos exactly 300 feet away from his girlfriend every time he longed for home.

In Knowing You, Knowing Me (1997), Recke transforms his letter correspondence with artist Robert Morris into a text- and soundless video that reflects on the experience of Morris' felt works. In the current exhibition LAND at Kunsthal Aarhus, his work Insecurity Zone (2009) is central. This piece is a video documentation where Recke, blindfolded, fumbles his way across Spiral Jetty, a monumental land art work by Robert Smithson.

Recke’s work challenges the senses by incorporating both the visual and physical experience of the landscape, and over the past 25 years, he has exhibited in several solo and group shows through Stalke Galleri.

In my father`s surviving papers, I found a small stack of Polaroid pictures taken in the late 60s by one of his friends who had traveled around the southwestern part of USA.

I remember my dad showed them to me in the evening before I was sleeping and told stories about Indians and cowboys who lived in these landscapes.

I have kept these pictures for 21 years and they have inspired me because I did not know where they were from, but I felt akin to the landscapes and elements in the images.

In the last 3-4 years I have thoroughly explored the motives to find their location.

In 2009 I made a major journey to find the motives that had haunted me in so many years and am now confident that I found the same motives and

photographic standpoint as my father`s friend stood in for more than 40 years ago.

These are the legendary places in the American nature, which of course has been there for ages. Yet I was surprised that something which has existed throughout my life may be allowed to stand as it stood.

It feels nice and secure knowing that the pictures do not lie and that childhood

ideas about the Wild West was actually repaid in full.

The motifs are from the Painted Dessert in Arizona and Monument Valley, Utah.