Marie Birkedal draws on the traditions of the New York School through an ongoing engagement with colour, scale, surface and the physical construction of a painting. Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and Agnes Martin are among the painters she returns to repeatedly.

The connection is not a question of reproducing a historical style. Birkedal approaches these traditions from the position of a contemporary painter for whom abstraction and figuration are not opposing categories. A painting can appear abstract at one distance and become recognisable at another. The difference is often one of scale, focus and ways of looking.

Material and time are equally important. Some paintings consist of one or two extremely thin layers and are completed in a day. Others accumulate hundreds of layers and remain active for more than a decade. Waiting, drying, covering and returning become part of the structure of the work.

Colour is treated as material rather than decoration. Beauty is also taken seriously rather than treated as something superficial. Birkedal’s paintings combine this attention to colour and formal structure with experiences, images, literature and art history that remain present beneath the surface.

This creates a relationship to the New York School without turning the work into historical quotation. The earlier painters form part of a larger coordinate system that Birkedal continually moves through, leaves and returns to.