The Fossil of the Present: A Study of Kaare Sebastian Golles

To enter the world of Kaare Sebastian Golles is to confront the weight of history not as a set of dusty textbooks, but as a physical, often violent presence in the room. The Danish artist, born in 1985, operates at a strange and compelling intersection where the idealism of Neoclassical marble meets the visceral, unadorned reality of the industrial slaughterhouse. His work does not merely inhabit space; it interrogates it, probing the thin, civilized surface of contemporary life to reveal the ancient, cyclical rhythms of creation and decay that pulse beneath. Whether he is working with massive public monuments or intimate bronze editions, Golles maintains a consistent focus on the material residue of our culture, treating the artifacts of the modern era as if they were already archaeological finds from a long-lost civilization.

Golles graduated from the Aarhus School of Architecture with a BA in 2011 before moving to the Malmö Art Academy, where he completed his MFA in 2014 under the tutelage of Professor Haegue Yang. This dual background in architecture and fine art is palpable in his treatment of form. There is a structural rigor to his sculptures, even when they appear fragmented or destroyed. He possesses the architect’s understanding of volume and site-specificity, but he applies it to subjects that are intentionally broken, scarred, or rendered incomplete. It is this tension, between the desire for architectural unity and the reality of postmodern fragmentation, that gives his oeuvre its particular psychological gravity.

Origins and the Ritual of the Slaughter

The biography of Kaare Sebastian Golles is inextricably linked to two very different institutions: the art academy and the slaughterhouse. For four years, Golles worked in an industrial wholesaler meat department, an experience that profoundly shaped his understanding of materiality and the human condition. In the slaughterhouse, he encountered a world stripped of euphemism, where the animal body is reduced to a commercial product through a series of highly efficient, ritualistic actions. This environment, characterized by steel, plastic, and the raw presence of meat, provided a counterpoint to the hallowed halls of art history. For Golles, the preparation of a meal is not just a domestic task but one of the core ritualistic practices that establishes the divide between nature and culture.

This background informs his rejection of the 'classically beautiful' in favor of something more 'cut to the bone.' In his view, the modern world has lost the vocabulary to communicate with the grand, totalizing visions of the past, such as the works of Michelangelo or the Danish Neoclassicist Bertel Thorvaldsen. While Golles admits to a fascination with Hellenistic sculpture, he finds the ideological unity they represent to be unattainable today. When attempting to sculpt a complete human figure, he often finds himself driven to destroy it, chopping into the clay or plaster in an act of creative butchery. The fragment, he argues, has become our reality; the wound of history is one that will not heal, and his work serves as a witness to this condition.

The Practice: Between Monument and Ruin

Kaare Sebastian Golles has built a practice that ranges from small-scale tactile objects to major public commissions. In 2021, he completed a permanent public monument for the poet Inger Christensen in Copenhagen, a project that demonstrated his ability to translate poetic sentiment into enduring material form. However, even in his public works, there is a sense of the geological and the ancient. His broader oeuvre includes installations and sculptures presented at prestigious venues such as ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Kunsthal Nord, and Galleri Nicolai Wallner. As the founder of PINTO PROJECT, an independent project space and publication platform in Copenhagen, he also acts as a curator and facilitator, further embedding himself in the Scandinavian contemporary art scene.

His work is often characterized by a clashes of materials. He might juxtapose the cold, clinical feel of industrial metals with the warm, organic textures of cast bronze or plaster. This material dialogue mirrors his conceptual interests in the 'sacrificial structure' of modern society. Golles observes that ancient sacrificial rituals have not disappeared; they have simply shifted from grandiose public spectacles to the mundane, everyday rituals of processed consumption. By bringing the aesthetics of the slaughterhouse into the gallery, he forces the viewer to confront the brutality that underpins the civilized surface of our lives, suggesting that sculpture itself has always been connected to death, dating back to the first stones raised on ancient graves.

References and Influences

The intellectual lineage of Golles is diverse, spanning from the rigorous conceptualism of Haegue Yang to the marble halls of the Thorvaldsen Museum. He frequently references the Neoclassical tradition, not to emulate it, but to mark its distance from our current era. When exploring the Thorvaldsen Museum, he notes the way each marble sculpture inhabits its own ray of sunlight within a dedicated room, a physical manifestation of a time when art could still aim for ideological unity. For Golles, this unity is a ghost. He views the contemporary era as one of perpetual exchange and fragmentation, where the 'ideological unity' of Jason with the Golden Fleece is a language we can no longer speak.

This leads him to a practice of 'scraping away the layers.' He looks to the slaughterhouse not for its gore, but for its honesty. In that environment, reality is experienced on a one-to-one scale. There is no room for the 'nauseating' beauty of the purely decorative. Instead, he pursues a form of beauty that is found in the brutal and the essential. His influences are not just other artists, but the very processes of industry and nature: the way a car tire is reclaimed by the sea, or the way bronze patination mimics the slow passage of geological time. He treats the products of the automotive industry as the fossils of our future, viewing the petroleum-based objects of today through the lens of deep time.

In Conversation

In his discussions regarding his methods, Golles often returns to the concept of the 'wound.' He describes a physical struggle with the medium, where the act of creation is inseparable from an act of destruction. He notes that whenever he tries to create something classically beautiful, it feels false, requiring him to take a hatchet to the work to bring it back to a state of truth. This 'hatchet' is both literal and metaphorical; it represents the artist's refusal to provide easy comforts or decorative surfaces. The result is a body of work that feels intensely tactile and present, demanding the viewer acknowledge the physical labor and the conceptual 'butchery' involved in its making.

He also speaks of the 'sacrificial' nature of the food industry as a mirror for society. The way we consume, the way we package life, and the way we discard the remnants of our industrial processes all find their way into his sculpture. By focusing on fragments, a piece of a body, a discarded tire, a lump of patinated metal, he captures the essence of a world that is constantly being broken down and rebuilt. His work is a meditation on what remains when the 'civilized surface' is stripped away, leaving only the bone and the bronze.

The works with Edition Solenne

The collaboration between Kaare Sebastian Golles and Edition Solenne brings this heavy, philosophical practice into the intimate sphere of the limited edition. The central work of this release is Fossil (Michelin), a 2023 sculpture cast in black patinated bronze. Measuring 13 x 7 x 7 cm, this work is a distillation of a much larger, ongoing project titled FOSSILS. The origin of this series is serendipitous and poetic: during a fishing trip, Golles pulled a discarded car tire from the seabed. This image of a mass-produced, petroleum-based object being reclaimed by the ocean floor struck him as a potent symbol of our era. It represented a transformation of organic matter into industry, and its eventual return to the earth as a future fossil.

Fossil (Michelin) takes the rugged, textured surface of a degraded tire and transforms it into an object of absolute permanence. By casting this industrial fragment in bronze, Golles elevates it to the status of a relic. The choice of black patinated bronze is significant; the material possesses a weight and a gravity that a rubber tire lacks, while the patina gives it the appearance of something that has spent eons undergoing chemical changes in the dark depths of the sea. The sculpture is small enough to be held in the hand, creating a tactile connection between the viewer and the artist's exploration of cycles of destruction and recreation.

The making of Fossil (Michelin) is a testament to the traditional lost-wax casting process, carried out at the renowned Fonderia Artistica Mariani in Italy. This foundry, established in 1952, is known for its precision, and that technical mastery is evident in the finished work. Each of the 12 editions (plus 4 Artist's Proofs) began as a hollow wax replica taken from the artist's original mold. These wax forms were then encased in ceramic shells and fired, allowing the wax to run out and the molten bronze to take its place. This method ensures that every detail of the original's surface, the scars, the grain, the structural memory of the tire, is captured in metal.

Once cast, the bronze is meticulously chased by hand to remove any seams or imperfections from the casting process, ensuring the form reads as a single, continuous surface. The final stage is the application of the black patina, achieved through the careful application of heat and chemistry. This patina is not a paint but a chemical change in the surface of the metal itself, which is then sealed to protect the finish. The result is a work that feels both ancient and contemporary, a physical record of the hand that made it and the industrial world it critiques. As an editioned work, Fossil (Michelin) allows the collector to own a piece of Golles’ broader investigation into the 'wounds' of history and the enduring power of the fragment.

Closing

Kaare Sebastian Golles occupies a singular position in contemporary sculpture. In a world often obsessed with the digital and the ephemeral, he remains deeply committed to the heavy, the physical, and the permanent. His work serves as a reminder that we are constantly creating the archaeology of the future, and that the objects we discard today will one day be the fossils that define our civilization. Through his meticulous use of bronze and his unflinching gaze at the rituals of destruction, Golles creates art that is 'cut to the bone,' offering no easy answers but providing a profound material encounter with the nature of existence.

Whether he is referencing the marble statues of Thorvaldsen or the cold steel of a slaughterhouse, Golles maintains a reverence for the fragment as the only honest way to represent the modern condition. His collaboration with Edition Solenne is a continuation of this journey, offering a compact but powerful distillation of his worldview. In the weighted presence of Fossil (Michelin), one finds the entire trajectory of his practice: the movement from nature to industry, from artifact to art, and from the ephemeral moment to the enduring resonance of bronze.