Svend Wiig Hansen: Walking, Falling, Standing

Svend Wiig Hansen (1922–1997) created works that revolve around the human condition, exploring love and joy, but also anxiety, existential loneliness and longing in the shadow of the post-war years and the Cold War.

Walking, Falling, Standing presents the Danish painter and sculptor as he was: a passionate, sensitive and wide-ranging artist. For him, art was also a way of passing something on: sharing the life force he believed it could carry.

The exhibition brings together sculpture, painting and printmaking from the 1950s onwards. Wiig Hansen trained as a sculptor, and the weight and materiality of sculpture are strongly felt in his paintings and prints. His urge to create lasted a lifetime, prompting him to explore different media and materials. He sought to portray human existence in all its facets.

Svend Wiig Hansen’s connection to Vendsyssel was both personal and artistic. For many years, the family spent their summers at their house near Kandestederne, south of Skagen. Here he worked on his art, surrounded by the North Sea, the wind, the vast dunes and shifting sandbanks – a  landscape in constant motion and transformation.

Wiig Hansen created several series of prints during his stays at Hjørring Printmaking Workshop, and in 1993 Vendsyssel Museum of Art acquired 96 works from the workshop with support from the New Carlsberg Foundation. The exhibition presents a selection of his lithographs, etchings, linocuts and woodcuts, all of which explore the human figure and portraiture in ever-new variations and contexts.

Today his work feels newly relevant, partly because we now find it easier to speak about the fragility of the human mind and how this vulnerability is a shared human experience. Wiig Hansen’s paintings and sculptures feel immediate in a time marked by geopolitical uncertainty. His works simultaneously hold deep doubt and a fierce belief in humankind’s unquenchable drive and desire to live. In the intense and powerful works, reality seems to transform into a psychological landscape without time or place. The figures exist in the tension between recognisable shapes, dissolution and abstraction.

Walking, Falling, Standing shows Wiig Hansen as an artist of great courage, willing to take risks and put himself on the line in the creative process. Always searching, always in motion. Walking, sometimes falling, but always standing.

The exhibition is supported by:
The Augustinus Foundation and Knud Højgaards Fond.