John Kørner:
Intercontinental Super Fruits

NOVEMBER 18, 2021 – JANUARY 30, 2022

Grocery, bodega, market, party store – these are just some of the names for a place where one might spend several hundred hours within a lifetime to obtain nourishment. These sites of consumption are networks for cultural exchange, where global citizens gain an understanding of local customs while also exploring new tastes, textures, and scents. Intercontinental Super Fruits presents work that engages artist John Kørner’s visual explorations of the allure of product advertisement and globalization in the rapidly expanding commodities trade industry. Kørner, a visionary artist from Copenhagen, Denmark, whose studio practice traverses painting, graphics, and sculpture, will introduce Intercontinental Super Fruits as a large-scale multi-sensory installation in MOCAD’s Woodward Gallery.

This exhibition will encourage visitors to engage with the artist’s perspective about the nostalgic nature of the phenomena of the local, regional, national and global superstore. Rooted in the movement of food which has created landscapes of surplus and scarcity, the works presented represent the artist’s interest in the blurred lines between the fantastic and the idle. Intercontinental Super Fruits is the first solo museum exhibition of Kørner’s work in the United States.

Intercontinental Super Fruits is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in collaboration with Danish Arts in Detroit. Additional support for Intercontinental Super Fruits is provided by the Danish Arts Foundation. MOCAD’s curatorial fellowship program and related exhibitions and programs are supported by the Ford Foundation.

Image: John Kørner, Supermarket Fruit, 2020. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.