Horse droppings are not figs, Overgaden, Copenhagen, Denmark, 22 February - 4 May 2025
For O—Overgaden, Bengtsson has created a new series of works, including a grand 6-meter-wide painting, hung unstretched and heavy. The artist’s particular technique is based on rubbing color onto hessian—also called jute canvas—impregnating motifs into the rough structure of the fabric. Leaving the threads visible, the free-hanging colored textile alludes to historical weavings—a kind of poor man’s Gobelin. Mimicking the grand storytelling of traditional tapestries, this piece is an epic depiction of rural life in Northern Europe, as if (mis)understood from a distant future, creating a historicization that is more fabulation than fact. In the mindset of this awry archeological digging, the motifs’ soft colors of cadmium red/purple and cobalt green unfold a world gone wrong: a rural harvest in a surreal turmoil assembling oversized vegetables, an awry plow clad in tiles, burning houses, a giant fishhook, dissected carps, and pigs turned trap nets.
The grand-scale painting is overlaid with a belt of a repeated blue animal motif with a bright star at its center. A dark emblem— based on the simplified contour of a goat-hand-gesture—hinting at US Pop art, while it underscores Bengtsson’s tongue-in-cheek or rebellious dyed takeover of historic tapestry. In another series, several pigs are cut out, DIY origami style, from painted canvas. Wonky and imprecise in their remake, the pigs point at how scientific or historical image representations or translations never get it quite right, destabilizing binaries of true and false. This twist is also clear in the exhibition title Horse droppings are not figs, a Dutch proverb about how to not be fooled by appearances; don’t mistake “horse apples” for the fig tree’s sweet tasting, brown fruit.
Meanwhile, Bengtsson’s associative motifs continue in a broken frieze of paintings puzzling together dormant, or simply dead, human figures or up-side-down, distorted bodies—as if buried or submerged. In Bengtsson’s mythologized narratives, disguised as historical weavings, apocalyptic scenarios repeat. As such, these shadow motifs and their distorted depictions mixing historical farming and fishing culture corrupt the idea of a true history, hinting at how pseudoscientific narratives still lurk behind our perception of reality today.
