The committee described how Astrid Kruse Jensen’s work created common stories that send the viewer on an emotionally powerful journey into our memories.
The intrusive structures of the chemistry become an active, abstract visual processing of the fragmentary impressions of memory.”[4] In her recent ethereal series “Disappearing into the Past”, “Within the Landscape” and “Floating”, Astrid Kruse Jensen uses an old Polaroid camera and expired film to introduce unpredictability into her painterly compositions, creating light-drenched images that veer between concrete and mental landscapes.
Astrid Kruse Jensen’s use of double exposures, backlight, long shutter times and camera movements results in motifs out of focus, where the specific space is dissolved and erased.
She works with photography’s ability to record more than the human eye can capture and thus opens up a picture space that can only be rendered by way of the photographic gaze.” In her work, interiors and landscapes are dissolved in abstractions, which opens up an endless borderland or “a metaphysical universe transcending time and space”,[5] a state between the concrete and the abstract that questions photography as a mediums and its documentational heritage.
The committee highlighted Astrid Kruse Jensen’s creation of works, which “question what we see … her realistic scenarios are floating and dreamy … and the unreal and fairytale-like penetrates us … and remains in the afterthought as a poetic imprint.” [6] In 2021, Astrid Kruse Jensen received national attention for her duo-exhibition The Past Ahead of Me at Fotografisk Center, where she exhibited together with Norwegian photo-based artist Marie Sjøvold.
The exhibition focused on subjects such as family, fragility, grief and loss, and here, Astrid Kruse Jensen also presented embroidery and bronze works.