Marie Birkedal’s painting shares with Sigmar Polke and Robert Rauschenberg an interest in what can happen when the boundaries between image, material and painting become unstable.

Rauschenberg is one of Birkedal’s earliest and most persistent reference points. His ability to allow different kinds of material, imagery and visual information to exist within the same work remains important. Polke offers another model in which the surface of a painting can contain several competing systems at once: image, pattern, transparency, accident and material behaviour.

Birkedal’s work develops these questions through her own processes. Paint can be extremely thin, absorbed into raw cotton or paper, layered repeatedly or allowed to remain almost weightless. Images may become partially visible, disappear or move between recognition and abstraction. A figurative source can therefore remain present without functioning as a conventional image.

Her approach, however, is highly controlled. Material experimentation does not mean giving authority to chance. Decisions are continually made about density, transparency, colour, scale and when to stop. The process can change direction, but the work itself determines what is necessary.

This creates a practice in which experimentation and precision are not opposites. Materials are allowed to behave, but their behaviour is observed, tested and incorporated into an increasingly specific visual structure.