Marie Birkedal (b. 1976, Denmark) is a painter based in Berlin, graduated from Funen Art Academy in 2010.

In 2011, Birkedal wrote „Walk After the Sound”, describing drawing and painting as walking blindfolded through a dark forest, following a distant sound. The signal becomes weaker or stronger; the task is to remain attentive enough to follow it. Around the same period, she coined “Empathy and Alchemy” to describe her approach to painting. The two formulations are closely related: attention and responsiveness.

Birkedal works mainly in oil, but also in acrylic and watercolor, often thinning the paint until its binder dissolves. Pigment, binder, dissolution, turpentine or water, and evaporation all shape the process, creating surfaces that sometimes seem evoked rather than made. She describes this approach as “The Work Decides Always” which applies as much to time, as to materials: some works are completed quickly, while others remain in progress for more than a decade.

“Seven Lots of Luck and Eight Great Treasures,” is a series begun after reading an interview with Yoko Ono in The Guardian and has continued for nearly two decades. It comprises small oil paintings whose accumulated layers have by now acquired sculptural qualities.  This accumulation over decades can produce something close to a palimpsest: different moments remain materially present within the same surface. Earlier decisions may disappear and later become visible again.

Each painting determines how long it remains active, when to add or remove something, and when to leave it alone. Time and duration become part of the painting’s material. For Birkedal, prolonged looking shapes a work as much as active painting; she makes no distinction between the two.

Birkedal works in series creating distinct bodies of work, each begins with an interest and a framework of rules, restrictions, and limitations. She stays within that framework, and the works need to remain challenging; mastery can become complacency and kills there must be resistance. As soon as she masters something completely, she retires it to her toolbox and moves on to something, she does not yet quite know how to do.

The changes between bodies of work can look radical from the outside and have sometimes been mistaken for a search of, or a change in style but it is deliberate consequences of asking a question until it leads into another. One series leads into the next, a body of work that began with appropriation of Goya and Velázquez moved into Maria van Oosterwijck´s flowers and Willem van Aelst´s still lifes, an investigation that went on for over fifteen years. A series may be left for years and later become relevant again. The divisions are real, but not absolute. Questions disappear, return, mutate, or open into other questions.

Color sometimes forms the central restriction. Birkedal began working intensively with purple because she felt a strong resistance to it and stayed with the color for more than a decade. Over time, resistance became familiarity, then closeness. Working so intensely with a color means entering it: she does not simply use color; she inhabits it. The purple decade was followed by blue but under very different circumstances, in connection with the premature death of one of her closest friends. For approximately five years, she worked exclusively with blue oil paint.

The distinction between these beginnings matters. One might be described as formal an investigation initiated by the difficulty of a color and the other as personal, emerging in relation to grief. Birkedal does not believe this separation holds. The personal and the formal do not occupy different worlds. A color is material, but grief is also material. It takes place in a body, in time, in perception, in the physical world.

Her newest series revisits black oil, a material she worked with extensively around twelve years ago. The return is not nostalgic. The material has become relevant again from another point in the work. Different kinds of black oil form the material condition of the new paintings. There is a difference between a black oil paint that is partly transparent and one that is completely opaque, between Lamp Black, Ivory Black, and Mars Black oil, how they absorb and reflect light, move across a ground, and produce different depths when thinned.

These differences are not technical distinctions added afterwards to an idea. They are the work. Transparency, opacity, density, temperature, weight, absorption, drying, and the physical behavior of different black oils establish the conditions of the paintings.

The framework of a series is rigorous because it is built from restrictions. These limitations are not there to reduce freedom, but to make painting possible. Painting is such a vast field that limitations are necessary, because if everything goes, nothing matters.

A limited palette, one color, one material condition, one source, or one set of rules creates resistance and concentration. The limitation helps both the painting and the painter. It creates the conditions for attention to become precise enough to recognize what the work is asking for to walk after the sound, the point is not to control the painting in advance, but to reduce the noise enough to follow the sound.

Intuition is essential to Birkedal’s painting, but intuition depends on dexterity and the ability to perceive and respond to small changes while they are happening. Her painting demands concentration closer to that of an athlete before a sprint or a fighter before a match: the quiet place. It is not a space of unrestricted expression or lucky accidents.

Attention must be precise enough for small changes in material, weight, surface, color, transparency, or density to register. Material experimentation belongs inside this concentration; absorption, transparency, separation, density, and the interaction between paint and ground can alter what happens and following these changes requires the same attention as any deliberate action. The openness of the material and the precision of looking operate together.

Birkedal went to art school at a time when the prevailing idea was that the concept was the carrying force and the medium secondary. For her, making the medium secondary would be the same as making painting secondary, and painting is her life.

She has never believed that content and expression can be separated - they are the same thing; a materially focused painting does not have less psychological depth, less personal history, or less trauma. The separation of an idea from its execution and materiality makes little sense to her. Life does not happen in an abstract realm but through bodies - material.

Literature remains a continuous presence in Birkedal’s work, she holds a BA in English literature, but her relationship to books has always been idiosyncratic. Rather than being broadly read, she returns to the same books repeatedly, sometimes for decades. A sentence, a passage, or an entire book can remain active for years, much as a painting can remain active in the studio.

Birkedal is ambivalent in this, as she dislikes paintings that need words to accompany them. If something requires an explanation, it becomes a defense. Words can elaborate but never justify - especially a painting. A painting must be winning with its hands down. Two of Birkedal’s touchstones - favorite examples are The Veiled Christ and Weltempfänger: completely different artworks, but both so good that they require no explanation, words or prior knowledge.

Writers, sentences, and fragments enter Birkedal’s paintings and titles without functioning as illustrations or explanations. They remain alongside the work, as companions rather than defenders, sometimes visible and sometimes not.

The same pattern of staying, leaving, and returning exists in her relationship with color. A color can become the only color she works with for years, until it feels exhausted. She may then leave it completely, sometimes for years or a decade, before returning to it.

Repetition is not doing the same thing again. It is a way of remaining with something long enough for difference to become visible. In an almost On Kawarian sense, repetition, duration, and the repeated act are not opposed to change, they can become a way of seeing it.

Birkedal does not distinguish sharply between abstraction and figuration. It is a matter of zooming all the way in or moving all the way out. A flower can become abstract, so can an animal, body, landscape. At another distance, something apparently abstract becomes specific again, abstraction can exist inside the most recognizable object, just as recognition can emerge from something apparently abstract. The distinction depends on where you are looking from.

This way of looking also concerns what can be understood without first being translated into language. Birkedal does not treat the tactile and visual as secondary to language.

There are things that can be known visually or physically without being translated completely into words. Painting works in that territory.

An obvious route would have been to follow Richard Billingham’s path — an artist to whom Birkedal feels greatly indebted — but she is a painter.

Pigment, color, oil, and the capacity to focus intensely on something outside immediate circumstances are not a denial of those circumstances. They are another way of carrying them, she tells a story through materials.

Color, surface, translucency, density, drying, residue are not simply formal properties but part of how meaning is carried. Painting can begin where words are no longer sufficient.

In 2014, she wrote: How I learned the value of colors: “I grew up in many different places. In none of those places did the mirrors have any reflection. That is how I learned the value of colors.”

The precision of painting belongs directly to this relationship with color and material. Meaning is not added after the fact. It is made through the decisions themselves: how transparent a layer is, which ground is painted on, size, how much of an earlier layer remains visible, and how a surface absorbs, resists, or reflects.

Birkedal is not a painter who uses painting to illustrate a concept or an idea that exists independently of the work. She works with painting.