Hands touch, attempt to hold, only to reach once more into air, into emptiness. The gentle rewriting of an embrace, the suggestion of a gesture suspended between worlds. In Magnus Plessen’s paintings, protagonists merge, collage-like, caught in intimate moments, yet they often dissolve into vast landscapes. Great-grandfathers and fathers overlap with present family members. Poses indebted to the spirit of their time are revealed as staged, constructed; a hand holding a cigarette in the portrait of his great-grandfather, who never smoked. Within family narratives, what is fact, and what is fiction? 

Bodies remain in flux, in an unending search to evoke emotions that words cannot contain. Precious moments of intimacy, a dance between finding and slipping away. When words fail, whether in pain, loss, or love, it is the hands that return to the fore in Plessen’s work.

Works by Magnus Plessen have been placed in important international collections, incl. Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kunstsammlung NRW K20/K21, the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich).