Interiors
& Territories
![]()
The Danish painter Marie Irmgard Birkedal has been working on a group of works consisting of interior views and unusual still lifes since 2014. The Danish compatriot Axel Salto spoke of “supernatural interiors” a hundred years earlier, with a view to Matisse's bold pictorial inventions. Birkedal's colorful and large-scale sculptural paintings suggest a description as 'para natural': nature returns almost like a jungle in the supposedly circumscribed, sealed-off interior, in colors that model inner worlds, in forms that assert themselves as a matter of course. Instead of views, Birkedal presents us with breakthroughs: one does not look discreetly through the window into their interiors, it is as if walls were open and the room took back what civilization withheld from it.
As if in contradiction, Birkedal ties in with the imagery of the Spanish and Dutch Sieclo d’oro and the Baroque. Where our interiors are decorated by concept stores, Birkedal's adaptations of still life leave traces in need. Her color strategies and the decisive access to abstraction carry out a double movement. The arrangements are 'bound' and dissolved again, put together and bundled for themselves, infected with moods as if to test our reaction to the reappearance of the historical pre-images.
It is fascinating to see how Birkedal develops a vocabulary for the well-being of living and works through it in her pictures. According to Heidegger, living does not take place in empty shells: “Living is always a stay with things.” With the things, plants and animals, the large-format sculptural paintings depicts the precariousness of living in the spaces of the frame: solidification is threatened, the color would not, and empty spaces would not suggest a way out; the nomadic is longing and at the same time triggers fear.
Birkedal's interiors ask themselves about their suitability to store or release memories, they articulate wordless formulas for moods, show the raw and the designed, with and against the outside world, and leave - empty - as a question of how the place for sociability beyond mere consumption could be made habitable.
Dr. phil. Peter Kohlhaas (eng FG)
Galerie1214 shows from 1st June 2018 until June 22nd the exhibition "Savage Glitter II: Interiors + Territories" with the artist Marie Irmgard Birkedal. An artist talk with Marie Irmgard Birkedal takes place on Friday, June 1st, 6:30 p.m. in Galerie1214.
Alexandrinenstraße 1, 10969 Berlin-Kreuzberg, Concert bassoon +: Villa-Lobos / Heinichen.
An artist talk with Marie Irmgard Birkedal will take place on Friday, June 1st, 6:30 p.m. in Galerie1214. In the beginning, the Duo Concertante (* 2001) opens with Kathrin Goschenhofer (oboe) and Ulrike Buhlmann (bassoon) in our Fagott + series, with which we juxtapose compositions from the baroque and modern times.
Buhlmann and Goschenhofer interpret a baroque sonata by Johann David Heinichen and the first two movements of the duo for oboe and bassoon (W535) by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos.
