Colour is a structural element in Marie Birkedal’s painting rather than an addition applied after form has been established.

This creates a connection to Mark Rothko and the wider history of Color Field painting, where colour can determine the scale, atmosphere and internal organisation of a painting. Birkedal also repeatedly returns to painters including Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, whose work makes colour inseparable from the construction of the image.

Her relationship to this history is not based on reproducing Color Field painting. Colour operates alongside image, material, literature, memory and processes of layering. A painting may contain one exceptionally thin field of colour or hundreds of accumulated layers. Colour can be absorbed into raw cotton or paper, remain transparent, cover earlier information or allow it to remain visible underneath.

Birkedal treats beauty as a necessity rather than as something superficial. Colour is part of that position. It can organise attention, produce distance and make sustained looking possible.

The result is a relationship to Rothko and Color Field painting that remains active rather than historical. Colour retains its capacity to structure an entire painting, while being placed inside a practice concerned equally with material, time, images and ways of seeing