Marie Birkedal and Malte Fisker
Birkerød Art Association.
Marie Birkedal and Malte Fisker's works draw on a wide range of cultural, religious, and symbolic references. Their work exists in the tension between linear/painterly, constructive/expressive, opaque/transparent, flat/spatial, and so on.
In the works, silence and concentration are combined with a strong lyrical tone.
With just a few strokes, color, light, and line are brought together into an intimate whole, a transparent spirituality.
The works start where language ends it is not an intellectual experience but a sensual sensation.
With inspiration from artists such as Robert Ryman, Josef Albers, Giorgio Morandi, Agnes Martin, and Pat Steir, repetition is a central concept and the spirit inherent in the images.
One work leads to the next and is all part of a larger understanding, they are an attempt to create the greatest possible effect from an absolute minimum of components.
It can be the effect and potential of a single color on the image surface, a single shape, or just a few strokes - how little is needed for the image to breathe and exist on its own terms?
The decisions in the process are largely intuitive and visual, if the images do not breathe and create a unified whole, they are discarded or painted over. The pictures are successful when they have exciting brush strokes, as Agnes Martin would have said.
Fisker and Birkedal have been discussing painting since 2008. What interests the artists is that no work is identical, there will always be a slight variation depending on the amount of pigment applied and the pressure on the brush.
There is no ideal or intended position to observe the pictures from, in fact, the exact opposite, moving a little to the side changes the character of the pictures, the light reflected from the pasty layers of oil paint or from the white gesso ground, reorganizes the composition and creates an interaction between spacious illusion and the concrete surface. A field that was first seen as a figure can suddenly assume the character of the ground. These subtle openings created by the perception between hand and eye, as well as the impact of light, leave the final stage of creation for the encounter between viewer and work.
The artists see their individuality as a concept that creative individuals express their ideas, visually as well as spiritually, and they are honest because they live in our time. Abstracting from their personal experience and trying to understand the phenomenology behind color, form, and brushstrokes, collected in works of art on canvas and paper. They don't want to be original, but to be true to our time. Right here. Now.
