JYTTE REX
FLODEN – THE RIVER

The exhibition

JYTTE REX
FLODEN – THE RIVER

Photography and Film
12 May – 17 June 2007

bildkultur | galerie Stuttgart
through cooperation with

Kgl. Dänisches Honorarkonsulat Stuttgart
Dänisches Kulturinstitut Bonn
Deutsch-Dänische Galerie Berlin
Kommunales Kino Filmhaus Stuttgart


Exhibition opening
FLODEN – THE RIVER
Photographies and Paintings

Friday, 11^th of May 2007 at 7 pm
bildkultur | galerie, Markelstr. 19, 70193 Stuttgart

Introduction

Dr. Bernd Kretschmer
Leiter des Dänischen Kulturinstituts in Deutschland, Bonn

Dr. Thomas Bullinger
Direktor der Deutsch-Dänischen Galerie, Berlin

The artist will be present at the opening.


The exhibition is on view
from 12 May – 17 June 2007

The films

SILK ROAD & THE RIVER
Two films of Jytte Rex


The River (Floden)
A stream of associative patterns is woven into the many ambiguous meanings of the river image. There are cracks to blind areas of loss and oblivion, world fires and floods – and to an oasis of dreams, fantasies, myths. Images materialize in the borderline between mind and world.
Jytte Rex

Silk Road (Silkevejen)
In Denmark at least two directors rise above the commercial mainstream cinema. Lars von Trier is world famous, but veteran filmmaker Jytte Rex (born 1942) is little known, even in Denmark, although her recent feature film Silk Road (2004) is probably the most original Danish film since Triers Breaking the Waves (1996).
Commercial cinema tends to expel us from the screen, but in our family album we still have a history and a fate. Jytte Rex' intention was from the beginning to liberate the family album and bring it out of its private sphere into open artistic space. In doing this, Jytte Rex was making "dogma films" 25 years before Trier launched the concept, but she did it out of economical distress and not as a commercial gimmick.
Her delicate and sophisticated imagery has never found such brillant form as in Silk Road, her first feature film in 13 years. She develops the associative visions of a dying restorer of paintings. Images materialize in the borderline between mind and world as a radical rupture with the conventional straightforward narrative. The film is rather based on the notion of time expressed in Bob Dylans beautiful lines "Time is an ocean – but it ends at the shore."
Jytte Rex describes a time collapse, which is also an opening of the inner space. She visualizes the process of death in images that are at the same time ecstatic and intoxicated with joy. Her film is a journey through our history of culture from Mevlana Rumis dancing dervishes in the 12^th century Konya to modern ballet, from Leonardo da Vinci to Italo Calvino, from Handel to Arvo Pärt, and from the renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola to an astrophysicist who imagines that through a worm hole in the Andromeda galaxy we may watch the building of the Egyptian pyramids. Some of Jytte Rex' previous films have been compared to the great Russian director Andrej Tarkovskij.
Silk Road might be the film that Tarkovskij dreamt of making just before his death.
Christian Braad Thomsen





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