Interiors + Territories
Savage Glitter II: Interiors + Territories
Marie Irmgard Birkedal
Galerie1214
Alexandrinenstraße 1
10969 Berlin
Opening
1 June 2018
18:30–21:00
Exhibition
1–22 June 2018
Artist talk with Marie Irmgard Birkedal
1 June 2018, 18:30
Concert Fagott+
Duo Concertante
Kathrin Goschenhofer, oboe
Ulrike Buhlmann, bassoon
Johann David Heinichen, Baroque Sonata
Heitor Villa-Lobos, Duo for Oboe and Bassoon, W535, first two movements
Admission free
Interiors and Territories I, oil on canvas, 200 × 180 cm, 2014 - 2018
Interiors + Territories, installation view courtesy of Galerie 1214
Interiors + Territories
Dr. phil. Peter Kohlhaas
© Galerie1214, 2018
Since 2014, the Danish painter Marie Irmgard Birkedal has been working on a group of works consisting of interiors and unusual still lifes.
A hundred years earlier, her Danish compatriot Axel Salto spoke of “supernatural interiors” in relation to Matisse’s bold pictorial inventions.
Birkedal’s powerful colours and large-scale painterly formations suggest a description as “para-natural”: nature returns, almost jungle-like, into the supposedly circumscribed and sealed-off interior — in colours that model inner worlds, and in forms that assert themselves with an apparent self-evidence.
Interiors and Territories II, oil on canvas, 200 × 180 cm, 2014 - 2018
Instead of views, Birkedal presents us with breakthroughs. We do not look discreetly through a window into her interiors. It is as though walls have been opened and the room is reclaiming what civilisation has withheld from it.
As if in contradiction, Birkedal draws on the imagery of the Spanish and Dutch Siglo de Oro and the Baroque.
Where contemporary interiors are furnished through concept stores, Birkedal’s adaptations of still life leave traces of need and desire.
Her colour strategies and decisive movement toward abstraction perform a double movement. The arrangements are “bound” and dissolved again, isolated and gathered, infused with moods as though testing our response to the reappearance of historical precedents.
It is fascinating to see how Birkedal develops a vocabulary for the condition of dwelling and works through it in her paintings.
According to Heidegger, dwelling does not take place in empty shells: “Dwelling is always already a staying with things.”
With things, plants and animals, these large-scale painterly formations describe the precariousness of dwelling within the spaces of the frame.
Rigidity would threaten were it not for colour, and were empty spaces not to suggest possible ways out.
The nomadic becomes a longing and at the same time produces fear.
Birkedal’s interiors question their own capacity to preserve or release memories.
They articulate wordless formulas for states of mind; they show the raw and the formed, with and against the outside world.
And, emptied of people, they leave open the question of how a place for sociability beyond mere consumption might be made habitable.
Dr. phil. Peter Kohlhaas
© Galerie1214, 2018
Interiors + Territories, installation view courtesy of Galerie 1214, Hare’s Breath, After Willem van Aelst, For Joseph Beuys, oil on canvas, 220 × 200 cm and the paperworks
