Marie Birkedal (b. 1976) is an artist based between Copenhagen and Berlin. She graduated from Funen Art Academy with an MFA in 2010. Her practice is centered on painting and shaped by an ongoing investigation of materiality, entropy, time, and the physical behavior of paint.

In 2011, Birkedal coined the phrase “empathy and alchemy” to describe her approach to painting. Working across oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, and other materials, she thins her paints to the point where they begin to break down. Pigment, binder, water, evaporation, gravity, drying, rinsing, and accumulation become active parts of the process, giving the work a degree of autonomy. The resulting surfaces often appear less constructed than gradually evoked.

Time functions as a material within the work. Some paintings come about in half an hour, while others remain active in the studio for more than a decade. In particular, works built through translucent layers can involve long intervals of drying, waiting, reconsideration, or apparent inactivity. Birkedal approaches these intervals not as empty time but as part of the formation of the work itself.

Her practice draws freely across historical periods and traditions. Fayum mummy portraits, Fra Angelico, On Kawara, and John McCracken can coexist as points of reference, reflecting an approach to painting in which apparently contradictory positions are not necessarily opposites.

Birkedal does not treat the tactile and the visual as secondary to language. Her work proceeds from the conviction that perception can carry forms of knowledge that cannot be fully translated into words. Painting becomes a way of testing this territory rather than illustrating a predetermined idea: a practice structured by material decisions, duration, uncertainty, and the moment at which a work begins to feel complete.