Danish artist Troels Carlsen is interested in anything that has to do with the human condition. He is also inspired by art history and how art has portrayed human life for the past few centuries. Carlsen uses a variety of media to investigate these topics, including antique pages, paints, and trashed materials for his installations. He said, “I totally adore the many compositional challenges and symbolic combinations that arise during the course of work.”
These installations–All Is Truth, You Can't Tell a Man By the Song He Sings, and Decline of Discipline– take a look at past vs. present, life vs. death, and dream vs. reality. The skeleton figures, a recurring them in Carlsen's work, symbolize life that once existed and are the artist's attempt to question the meaning of life. He said, “The dying are desperate for more time and the bored have too much on their hands. In between these two extremes lies the narrative in my work.”
