Download the Catalogue PDF - Afgangs-undstillingen 2010

patchwork blankets are full of colors and personal stories
mounting into history. Irmgard’s Journal/ Baby Suggs’
Rag Rug consists of 40 x 40 cm drawings; they are equal
size squares as the patchwork rug patches. Each square
is a story told; some are told very directly, others are more
subtle.
For me, the excessive use of colors makes the stories
both bearable and unbearable: to allow myself to exceed
in colors made it bearable to tell the story and to continue
telling an autobiographical story. What makes it unbearable
is that colors exist independent of what happens to us
- life does not cease to be in colors when tragedy occurs.
I once read a story about a soldier in First World War.
He is left physically unharmed on the battlefield. After the
fight is over, he walks around between corpses and mutilated
bodies and sees to his horror that the sun is shining
in the metal, the blood is very red, the grass is very green
and that beauty does not cease to exist. There is a similar
scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where an ex-slave, Paul
D, is in despair because he cannot help but look at the
colors of America and love America for its beauty despite
of what that country has done to him. Bringing in pop
icons such as Elvis into these drawings can appear distasteful
but if there is a picture of Elvis (Hendrix or Willie
Nelson), it is because each of these particular icons once
had a personal relevance to me. Furthermore, the image
of them also serves to illustrate how everything (story, history,
pop culture, war) takes place at the same time and
how ungraspable that is.
The imagery in Irmgard’s Journal/ Baby Suggs’ Rag
Rug has a resemblance to William Blake’s drawings
and illustrations; Blake’s drawings are also psychedelic
watercolors and his drawings have often been accused
of being too much, too closed and too personal because
of what has been called his own eccentric and intricate
mythology. The title of Aldous Huxley’s The Door’s of
Perception comes from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything
would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has
closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow
chinks of his cavern”. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is
the one of Blake’s illustrated books that comes closest to
my drawings in Irmgard’s Journal/ Baby Suggs’ Rag Rug.
Thus, there is a link between my Irmgard’s Journal/ Baby
Suggs’ Rag Rug drawings and my Aldous paintings.
There is a linkage in all my works that ties the pieces
together. The seemingly many different styles or directions
I work within are all an exploration of painting. Different
ways of painting (styles) can have an identical atmosphere
- as with music; one can take a piece of Chopin
and it will have the same quality/atmosphere as a Dolly
Parton song or as a Sonic Youth song. It is not the genre
or style of the song or the painting’s that is important but
its authenticity.
The French Lieutenants Woman,
Felt-tip pen water colour, ink on paper, 40x40 cm.
From the serie irmgardsjournal