Marie Birkedal (b. 1976) is a painter based in Berlin. She graduated from Funen Art Academy with an MFA in 2010. Her work is shaped by materiality, entropy, time, and the physical behavior of paint.

In 2011, Birkedal wrote Walk After the Sound, describing the process of drawing and painting through the image of walking blindfolded through a dark forest, following a distant sound. The signal can become weaker or stronger; the task is to remain attentive enough to follow it.

Around the same period, she began using the phrase “Empathy and Alchemy” to describe her approach to painting. The two formulations describe closely related aspects of the same practice: attention, responsiveness, and allowing the work itself to determine what happens next.

Working across oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, and other materials, Birkedal 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, resulting in surfaces that often appear less constructed than gradually evoked.

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Birkedal describes this as: “the work decides always.”

This applies as much to time as to material. A painting can be finished in two days, while another may continue for more than two decades. Some works consist of one or two thin layers; others are built through dense accumulations of oil over many years. There is no predetermined duration and no predetermined number of layers. The work itself determines how long it remains active, when another layer is needed, when something has to be removed, and when nothing further should be done.

Time therefore becomes part of the material of the painting. Drying changes a surface, pigment settles, water or turpentine evaporates, oil penetrates or remains suspended depending on the ground. Layers cover, alter, dissolve, or expose what came before. Long intervals of apparent inactivity can be as much a part of the formation of a work as the moments in which paint is physically applied.

This accumulation can produce something close to a palimpsest: different moments remaining materially present within the same surface. Earlier decisions may disappear almost completely and then become visible again through what follows.

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 tends to return 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.

The same pattern of leaving, returning, and looking again appears in her relation to color. A particular color can become the only color she works with for years, until it is exhausted. She may then leave it completely, sometimes for several years or even a decade, before returning to it again. Repetition is not repetition in the sense of doing the same thing again, but a way of staying with something until it continues to open.

In this sense, On Kawara is an important point of reference: recurrence, duration, and the repeated act are not opposed to change. They can be a way of seeing it.

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

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, a face, a body, a landscape, or almost anything concrete. At another distance, something apparently abstract can become entirely specific again.

The distinction depends on where you are looking from.

Seen closely enough, something recognizable can become color, edge, surface, and structure; seen from another distance, something that first appears abstract can become specific again. Abstraction can already exist within the most concrete object, just as recognition can emerge from something apparently abstract.

This way of looking also concerns what can be understood without first being translated into language. Birkedal does not treat the tactile and the visual as secondary to language. There are things that can be known visually or physically without being completely translated into words. Painting works in that territory.

While the most obvious route for Birkedal might have been to make work directly about the conditions she came from, following in the footsteps of Richard Billingham, an artist to whom she feels greatly indebted, she chose another direction. Rather than depicting those environments themselves, she focused on what made it possible to survive them: beauty, color, attention, and the ability to concentrate intensely on something outside the immediate circumstances.

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

This is precisely why painting requires concentration and precision. Her painting demands a concentration closer to that of an athlete before a sprint or a fighter before a match: highly focused, almost somber.

It is not a space of unrestricted expression, accident, or lucky accidents. Attention has to become precise enough for very small changes in material, weight, surface, color, or rhythm to register.

Material experimentation belongs inside that concentration rather than outside it. The physical behavior of paint remains active throughout the process: absorption, transparency, separation, density, drying, gravity, and the interaction between paint and ground can all alter what happens. Following those changes requires the same degree of attention as any deliberate action. The openness of the material and the precision of looking are therefore not opposites; they operate together.

The Heroes/Inspirations

Artists who are part of Birkedal’s coordinate system — the ones she returns to:

Fayum mummy portraits, Fra Angelico, Giotto, Albrecht Dürer, Caravaggio, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, Maria van Oosterwijck, Willem van Aelst, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Sam Gilliam, Peter Bradley, Suzanne Jackson, Sigmar Polke, Joyce Pensato, Anke Weyer, Stanley Whitney, Cy Twombly, On Kawara, John McCracken, Mark Rothko, Jeff Wall, William Eggleston, Marlene Dumas, Agnes Martin and Tracey Emin.