“Les lisières du Night Club (The fringes of Night Club)” (provisional title) is the first solo exhibition in France by Danish artist Rasmus Myrus. Conceived in collaboration with 1646 in The Hague, where it will be shown in early 2024, it presents an ensemble of some thirty recent pieces, some produced for the latest Gothenburg Biennial (Sept. – Dec. 2023), others specially for The Hague or Rennes.

Rasmus Myrus’s humanoid sculptures combine elements from both the natural world and social history, from Norse mythology as well as from our post-modern societies. A marvellous storyteller and magician of postures, he gives life and substance to characters who are half human, half tree, queer beings with shifting identities, part scarecrow, part drag queen, part wild man and wild woman, part man and woman of the world, originating from a time that is as much prehistoric as it is post-human. This underworld community, this salon des refusés – as the artist calls it, using the title of one of his previous projects – redraws the contours of a possible society, made of bric-a-brac, branches and rhinestones, Wi-Fi cables and lichen, singularities and resistance. A society that grows and flourishes in spite of everything on the ruins of our forests and our blazing suburbs. Myrup’s characters are like Ana Tsing’s mushrooms at the end of the world: a lesson in optimism in a world that is all too often despairing.