PRESENTING ARTvonTRIER

Lars von Trier is indisputably one of the greatest film directors the world has ever seen; uncompromising and unconventional, he is notoriously famous for shocking his audience again and again with new strokes of genius.

Where do these masterpieces derive from? With ARTvonTRIER, we suggest that the key to understanding the genius of Trier is to look at him as a visual artist with extraordinary skills of image creation. The method of his moving images, which so strongly appeal to our sensibility rather than our logic, is significant.

Leaving the cinema, we are infected with impressions and feelings that were hitherto unfamiliar to us. This characterizes the unique, out-of-this-world, mind-and-body-merging sensation that only Lars von Trier is capable of composing.

Lars von Trier has throughout his career made 13 feature films. In each of them exist 24 images per second. In average, let us say each film lasts 1.5 hours. This means almost one and a half million images have been made in order to create the Lars von Trier movies we all know, love and hate. Naturally, we cannot see all these single frames. However, our eyes, mind and brain have been exposed to this inconceivably high number of visual stimuli when we watch the movie play out on the wide canvas. Perhaps it is exactly this moving magic that has triggered our sensory system to agree on Lars von Trier as a great artist.

In this project, however, we have decided to turn the tables upside down, in alignment with Trier’s well-known sets of rules. We are excited to present the imagery of Trier, which the world already believes itself familiar with, in a completely new setting: a gallery exhibition of stills where the images are interpreted as photographic art.

We present a small selection of images per movie that, by standing alone as a still, get the deserved space to breathe and manifest themselves as: an extract of the original artwork condensed into a single frame; an independent work holding its own visual language, meaning and aesthetics; and an example of world-class photographic art that has been overlooked by those who see Lars von Trier exclusively as a cinematographer.

It is exactly this punctuation of what we are used to think, how we are used to see the world, that is at stake. Trier offers with his images a way of sensing and comprehending the darkest sides of human nature that is immanently different to everything we know.

With ARTvonTRIER we extract scenes of the movies, materialized as stills, inviting the beholder to dive into and dwell within a universe of the beauty that lies within Trier’s depiction of the unimaginable, the anti-aesthetics characterizing Trier’s psychological thrillers gives the opportunity of grasping and processing some of our most intimidating states of mind — melancholia, depression, obsession, addiction, frustration, anger, sorrow, pain and grief — into something one can live with. Not understand, not accept, but live with and grow from. This is what makes Lars von Trier a true artist.

It is no secret that Lars von Trier is one of a kind, which can also translate into a feeling of not belonging anywhere — a returning theme in his movies. As a young man, Trier applied for both film and art school, but did not get into either. He even sent his paintings to Den Frie’s acclaimed censored exhibition in 1974. Not even here was he accepted. Luckily, this did not stop Trier from following his creative intuitions.

As any successful artist, Lars von Trier has studied images before creating his own. The way he portrays and pays homage to his predecessors — painters such as Caspar David Friedrich and Edvard Munch, filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Carl Th. Dreyer, and authors Albert Camus and Marcel Proust — elevates existing poetry into new dimensions through sublime image orchestration.

— MALOU SOLFJELD / ART HISTORIAN

Selected original framegrabs are transformed into museum-quality photographic art. The collection was curated by Jens-Otto Paludan together with art historian Malou Solfjeld and is presented by Freeze Frame Gallery in collaboration with Zentropa. Each edition is produced with carefully defined materials, sizes and documentation.