FOSSILS
Ole Vinter Room, Copenhagen, Denmark
April 25 - June 6 2025

In the exhibition FOSSILS Kaare Golles displays five large unique monoprints of found car tyres.

Pirelli Continental Michelin Goodyear Firestone

FOSSILS originated during a fishing trip, when Kaare Golles salvaged a car tyre from the seabed. The tyre immediately struck him as a relevant image: the rubber tyre, extracted from fossil material pumped up from reservoirs deep beneath the seabed, now returning to the seabed as a future fossil. A cyclical movement, back to zero. A vortex of creation, destruction and recreation. From the car tyre, he shaped imitations of marine fossils and cast them in bronze, which gave rise to the idea of working with the car as a catalyst and accelerator for civilisation and its development and decline. The car is like the 21st century. On the surface, civilised, harmonious, cultural and rational. But the surface hides something. Beneath the shiny bodywork, an archaic fire burns. With the car as its matrix, it has become a continuous series of works that has branched out into such diverse objects as tyre fossils, aluminium-cast engine hoods, monotypes of car tyres, the book speed, and a sculptural reworking of a Volvo PV544 – objects bound together in a hidden system of creation, destruction and recreation.

The works in FOSSILS are a representation of all the speed and power that surrounds us, all the roaring and thumping engines burning petrol, and the prehistoric power unfolding around us.

The exhibition has been realised with generous support from the Danish Arts Foundation and Director Espen and Mrs Tanja Neergaard Dinesen's Foundation.

Photo: Filip Gielda