This summer, La Criée presents Rasmus Myrup’s Salon des refusées, the Danish artist’s first solo show in a French venue. Some twenty characters, extravagant anthropomorphic sculptures, seated, lying down, standing, alone or in groups, occupy the space of the art center, transformed into a café/care center : a facetious and striking picture of an offbeat society.

Rasmus Myrup’s characters are drawn from Danish folklore, South Scandinavian oral traditions and Norse mythology. He draws his inspiration from the many characters that appear in them, reinterpreting their stories with a vivid imagination. Among these characters are some of the principal figures of the magical sphere, such as Gefion – goddess of the land – or the Nisse – the original ‘little Barbie’ from Scandinavian legends, and others less known, but no less important. The artist combines past and present, anchoring them in our postmodern society and its questions: in particular, they examine normativity, established order and morality, and flaunt their singularity, sensuality and freedom of being.

To create his sculptures, Myrup gathers natural objects as well as manufactured ones, from the scraps of consumer society, which he then assembles with extravagant virtuosity.
A wonderful storyteller, Myrup brings life and depth to characters who are half-human, half-plant, complete beings, Queers and allies with shifting identities and multiple lives, from a time as prehistoric as it is post-human.

This separatist community, this « Salon des refusés », draws the outlines of another possible society, made of odds and ends, branches and rhinestones, likes and lichen, singularities and resistance. A society that grows and flourishes, despite everything, on the ruins of forests and blazing suburbs.
Half of the sculptures were produced and presented at the Gothenburg Biennial in Sweden in autumn 2023, then at the 1646 art centre in The Hague, Netherlands, in early 2024. At La Criée, following two creative residencies, Myrup is adding a dozen new pieces made from materials gathered in Rennes and Brittany. While these new characters are firmly rooted in the Nordic imagination, Breton touches and crossovers appear here and there.
Against the current political climate, where cultural heritage and shared histories are becoming grounds for division and exclusion, Myrup’s characters celebrate diversity and mixing. They are like Anna Tsing’s mushrooms at the end of the world*: a lesson in optimism in a world that is all too often despondent.

* Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the possibility of living in the ruins of capitalism, trans. from English by Philippe Pignarre, pref. by Isabelle Stengers, Paris, La Découverte/The Preventers of Thinking in the Round, 2017, 415