Here (Once Again), Leaving the Gold - Maria Wandel

Maria Wandel (born 1977) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2005 and has since exhibited at both group and solo exhibitions – including here at the Vendsyssel Museum of Art at the group exhibition Vejen in 2014, and a smaller solo exhibition Parks and Hotel Rooms in 2015. Over the past few years, there has been an intriguing breakthrough in her artistic universe, as she has left the familiar and the tight compositions in favour of the experimental and more expressive brushstrokes. We are therefore pleased to present a special exhibition with Maria Wandel entitled: Here (Once Again), Leaving the Gold.

The exhibition is about painting! Maria Wandel paints because she cannot help it, and she is preoccupied with moving her painting by changing the way she thinks and works with painting. Therefore, the exhibition, which shows new works, is an expression of picturesque experimentation, where she examines what is possible with the painting – both in relation to technique and also regarding the choice of motifs and their compilations.

The paintings depict small snippets of reality; a banana, the expanses of the sea, a tennis match and much more, and all testify to small impacts in scenes, actions, thoughts and emotions.

The paintings place themselves in a field of tension between the figurative and the abstract and often contain references to the history of literature and art. This can be seen, for example, in the work Den lille gaffel (The Little Fork; 2020), which is a reference to the existentialist Søren Kirkegaard, who had this nickname, and the work Les Roches Noires (2019), which depicts the artist’s son standing by the window in the now-closed hotel of the same name somewhere on the coast of Normandy; a hotel where many painters began to come from the 1830s, and where one of Maria Wandel’s great sources of inspiration – the author Marguerite Duras – later lived and worked.

The exhibition’s works must be seen as part of a larger context – as part of an overall narrative. A story that starts with the various impacts in the works. But where the story ends is up to the viewer, and whether he or she has the desire and courage to get involved and elaborate on it.

The exhibition will be shown 03 October - 3 January 2020