Coupling defeat and despair with rebellious humor, Danish artist Peter Linde Busk explores the grotesque conditions of human existence. Populating his works with tragic and awkward figures like fallen heroes, jesters, or outlaws in abstract spaces of detailed ornamentation, his figurations are meticulously composed using a great variety of textures and techniques, and often incorporate random material relics from previous works. Similarly, his titles are wry quotes or poetic fragments: it is from Rilke that Peter Linde Busk has borrowed the title of the book, Who speaks of victory? To endure is all. This richly illustrated monograph features a major essay by art historian Maria Fabricius Hansen juxtaposing Linde Busk’s work with medieval mosaics and the grotesques of Renaissance art. A catalogue raisonné of works from 2015 to 2022 is supplemented by short prose texts and a playlist by writer Minna Grooss that suggests a sound track to the materially emphatic works by Linde Busk.

Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres. Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating tensions - monstrosities even - that manifest themselves in a variety of ways. In some cases, dichotomies (between order and chaos, artificiality and nature, rational logic and imaginative creativity, etc.) may emerge. Elsewhere, a sense of agitation undermines structures of statuesque control or erupts into wild, unruly displays of constant genesis. The monstrosity of ornament is brought into play through strategies of hybridity and metamorphosis, or by the handling of scale, proportion, and space in ambiguous and discomforting ways that break with the laws of physical reality. An interest in strange exaggeration and curious artifice allows for such colossal ornamental attitude to thrive within early modern art.