Nina Sten-Knudsen
With her overwhelmingly large paintings, Nina Sten-Knudsen have turned her gaze toward a space of reflection tinged by an immense silence, where she enlists the aid of visual art references in her exploration of painting's present possibilities. Although Nina Sten-Knudsen consciously draws from the legacy of art history's great painters: da Vinci, Rembrandt, Degas and Vermeer, the paintings she creates are far from traditional paintings. Nina Sten-Knudsen revitalise questions about space, perspective, figuration and approaches taken as given in painting, before the 20th Century did away with the figurative.
As the title of one of her paintings The Landscape, Later (1998), suggests, Nina Sten-Knudsen consciously works with the idea that one specific form of landscape painting is not viable anymore. In terms of her choice of motives, she situates herself up against something best designated as a romantic/classical landscape tradition, yet her paintings constitute a deconstruction of this very tradition. Nina Sten-Knudsen speaks about this strategy as a way of working with a polyfocal space: Space and composition are not constructed on the basis of any traditional one-point perspective, as known from the Renaissance's distinct spatial focal point. What happens here is rather a dispersal of colour and space, resulting in several focal points. The picture consists of a suite of individual parts which are held in place within a structure where different compositional ideals from art history - landscape, figure, human beings, nature - are juxtaposed in such a manner that different epoch’s apprehension of the landscape are put into play.
Characteristic of Nina Sten-Knudsen's paintings are the enormous formats. The landscapes are so vast that it’s almost possible to step right into them; the paintings are perceived as "spaces" rather than pictures. In addition, the colours' dramatic shimmering and intensities and the enormous accumulation of signs and picture materials connote layer upon layer of meanings preserved on the surface and are painted to the edge of the canvas.
In the gigantic painting entitled Library (2001), Nina Sten-Knudsen’s exploration of the staged, perspectival and spatially complex landscape painting attained new heights. Themes such as time, space and history are in focus and in this particular painting; she continues to develop her work with spatial figures. Visible are small, independent three-dimensional entities which, when viewed together, constitute a network of narratives on the enormous surface.
As the title indicates, the focus on these spatial figures is based on literature. In the lower half of the painting, a rather obscure landscape, we are presented with an illuminated library, a reading room, bookshelves and people immersed in reading. The complexity of themes corresponds with the upper half of the painting, a luminous celestial landscape. In itself, through the agency of the multitude of perspectives, the landscape forms a platform for a number of different narratives. It's impossible to determine whether we are looking down from the sky onto a landscape of fields and river valleys or standing in the landscape and looking up at the sky's multiple nuances.
The Painter and the Model (2004) is the title of yet another monumental painting - both the title and the work's composition contain several references to art history and displays Nina Sten-Knudsen's great knowledge of the artistic effects of painting. In the centre of the large painting are two figures: The painter, a naked woman in the process of painting a model whilst sitting and the model - the male figure visible in the centre. In his hand the male model has a miniature painting of a landscape, arguably the starting point for the landscape motive of the large painting. Onto his chest a drawing on paper (supposedly a drawing of him), made by the female painter is stuck. The female painter is naked, an indication that she herself is also a model and thus equally subjected to our gaze. This composition opens up to the interpretation of who really is the subject of our gaze when encountering Nina Sten-Knudsen's painting. A number of compositions within the painting refer to Nina Sten-Knudsen's own practice as a painter. Both the unfinished face of the model, the miniature landscape painting held in the hand of the male model and, finally, the paper sketch painted onto the canvas, are elements that all refer to the artistic process of painting. Nina Sten-Knudsen often paints reproductions of photographs of people on the canvas as constituent elements.
In the case of Balcony (2005) several cityscapes and perspectives are present at once. It is a nocturnal scene of a modern city's flood of light, projected in over a tranquil and imposing space of monumental buildings. The historic comes face to face with the contemporary, bathed in the light from the modern metropolis.
Nina Sten-Knudsen’s dreamlike painterly landscapes consist of layer upon layer of meanings hidden in the surface. Visible is everything from small glass with colour pigment to explosive cosmic energies – from the single individual rooted in his own world to the masses marching through history. Nina Sten-Knudsen’s paintings are comparable to a massive picture book, providing the viewer with numerous angels of incidence and associations all at once.
Nina Sten-Knudsen's practice is comparable to a Pandora's box because of the multitude of meanings, enigmatic allegories and ambiguous readings that her paintings usually contain. We are presented with paintings by an artist not afraid of exploring important subjects and deep emotions in her observations and reflections about our time and existence. Of equal importance is Nina Sten-Knudsen's intense work with the paintings' colour and their texture. With Nina Sten-Knudsen’s paintings it is not a matter of an either-or but rather a coexistence of different forms of expression, with both the figurative and the abstract as artistic variables.
Nina Sten-Knudsen’s significant references to our day and age as well as art- and cultural history are strictly metaphorical images. As one of few painters, never afraid of touching great subjects or deep emotions, she constructs in her rich colour paintings where many different worlds, culture and periods appear simultaneously.