Michael Kvium
Michael Kvium is one of Scandinavia’s most distinctive painters. He had his breakthrough in the middle of the 1980s, where he not only demonstrated straight away his very personal, figurative way of painting but also, in collaboration with his colleague, Christian Lemmerz, made performances and films in the performance group, Værst.
Since then, Kvium has furthered his technique as a painter to a point of perfection, and sharpening his idiom around a motif world, from the onset occupied with the study of humanity and the fundamental conditions of existence. In Kvium's gloomy but also absurdly humorous exegesis of human life, he puts on display that which worries him about the cultural, social and political conditions we have created for ourselves. What he sees are tendencies in the direction of a growing moral and emotional callousness, derailed sexuality, guilty conscience, collective sightlessness, existential loneliness and dread and an irresponsible and almost self-destructive devastation of the surroundings that we are a part of.
Kvium in a personal gallery of monstrous, obscene and grotesque physiognomies unfurls this complex of problems which we might repress -or which we cannot stand being confronted with -. His canvases are peopled by deformed, crumpled up, bound or coalesced human bodies which have been equipped with a number of different iconographic attributes, such as brassieres, stockings, bandages, fool's caps, penises, breasts, lemons and eggs. But his artistic vocabulary also spans across a series of paintings of misshapen organic excrescencies of an indeterminate character, which call cancerous occurrences or abortive cloning attempts to mind. These are paintings that possess a great deal of aesthetic beauty in spite of the outrageous monstrousness of their content.
Theatrical scenarios like in A Kitchen Scene (1986) were subsequently replaced by more Baroque-tinged allegories, such as in the four staggeringly large civilization-critical paintings entitled Choir, The War Stratagem of God, A Gift of Nature and The Power of Thought (1991) where skulls and exposed masses of brain tissue are central symbols. In his portrait series, Fools, of buffoons, half-wits, retarded people and imbeciles, the people in these pictures gaze to the front, with empty expressions. In Choir, they are gaping insanely; they have apparently been wounded and have been collectively bound by bandages around their hands. The bandages suggest mutual solidarity but they also hamper the people from taking action; it's difficult to imagine that this choir can sing anything at all.
Kvium is taking a look at human haughtiness, which leads us in the name of rationality into believing that we are the Lords of all things and that we can thus do whatever we please with the planet. This is human blindness, and Kvium has rendered this sightlessness thematic again and again, both indirectly and directly, in Blind Painting (1991-92), Double Me (1993), Abstract Me (1993) and Blind Eggs (1995). What we have here is a series of paintings rendered principally in black and yellow, with the symbol for blindness with it’s three black dots on a yellow background, people with blindfolds on their eyes or faces that are just staring at us with empty expressions. They can be seen as variations on Breughel's famous picture, "The Blind Leading the Blind". We have become blind to ourselves and to each other, and Kvium is showing benevolence and charity transformed into narcissism.
In 1997, Kvium created Circus Humanus for the Aarhus Art Museum. In this exhibition, he put aside his work with painting for the sake of creating a series of new video installations and two sculptural works. "The human circus" ensnares classical themes in Kvium's art, built up here as confrontations, reflections or encounters of thematic oppositions between black and white, life and death, the positive and the negative.
It is also this collocation of night and day, the profane and the sacred, which characterizes The Wake (2000), an eight-hour long silent-film paraphrase of James Joyce's avant-garde novel "Finnegan’s Wake", which Kvium created in collaboration with the sculptor Christian Lemmerz. The film puts the picture in focus, in preference to the narrative, and shows to us the nocturnal side of our consciousness. There are many enthralling images in this film, and as is often the case in Kvium's pictures, they are far from being equally agreeable.
These new forms of artistic expression have also left their trails in his more recent paintings, where we can see a development in the direction of a greater degree of abstraction, a more subtle way of rendering taboos and traumas thematic.
Even though, in his paintings, Kvium is disclosing his concerns about our society, his paintings are anything but social-realistic accusations. The large measure of black humour and the consistent insistence on an artistic pictorial aesthetics - in Kvium's work, the implemented application of the grotesque as the bearing element in an aesthetics of ugliness, which transgresses both beauty's ideals and moral standards - gives rise to the effect that he can take up tabooed subjects without having to moralize. This is one reason why his paintings can arouse both a sense of disgust and a sense of fascination in the viewer.
In his latest paintings Michael Kvium has "imported" the quietude of the wood. As with his exhibition "Deep Forest" at Horsens Art Museum in 2003, Nature is in focus in Kvium's paintings. The characteristic figures placed in wastelands of trees and water, naked, lonely or in groups, have been pulled back in the picture plane of the new paintings. Rather painterly qualities like colour and texture have become central elements in the narrative of the strange, yet beautiful landscapes.
In the beginning of 2006, Michael Kvium’s retrospective exhibition "Jaywalking Eyes" was on show at ARoS, Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark. The exhibition featured 100 paintings from 1984-2006. The paintings were exhibited in 7 thematic rooms, especially constructed for the exhibition. The exhibition had a fantastic reception from both media and audience, which resulted in over 132.000 visitors during the period of opening.
Michael Kvium’s paintings evoke responses in his audience as he invites the viewer into byways in the human mind that awakes disgust, recognition and fascination. The large portion of absurdity and black humour prepares the way for transcending ideals of beauty and norms. Thus no one is left indifferent when encountering his work.