Marie Birkedal does not treat abstraction and figuration as separate categories. The distinction is closer to a question of distance, scale and focus.

A form can appear abstract when seen closely and recognisable when seen from farther away. The same movement can also happen in reverse. A leaf, a piece of skin, a colour, a fragment of an object or a section of an image can lose its ordinary identity when attention moves close enough to its surface.

This way of looking is central to Birkedal’s painting. She describes it as zooming in and out rather than moving between two opposing traditions.

As a child, concentrating intensely on small fragments of the visible world — a leaf, a colour, a surface — becomes a way of creating distance from a dangerous environment. That visual mechanism remains present in the work. Attention changes the scale of experience.

The paintings therefore do not need to choose between representing something and becoming abstract. An image can remain embedded in a painting while colour, material and surface become equally important. Recognition can arrive slowly, disappear again or never become complete.

Abstraction and figuration function as different distances from the same visual information.