MIKKEL SØNDERGAARD, “FLAMING”, PAINTING, COLLAGE, DRAWING & A NEWSPAPER

Welcome to FLAMING midway opening Thursday 4 August, 2005, kl. 17 – 20.

Galerie Birthe Laursen is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Mikkel Søndergaard, FLAMING, on display from July 14 through August 20, 2005.

Featuring recent paintings and drawings by Mikkel Søndergaard, FLAMING offers a colourful and bubbling universe, populated by everything from Bode Miller to a flying bear, from a green Elvis to Berlusconi at his peak. Søndergaard juggles steadily with different styles: whether big portraits or non-figurative paintings inspired by graffiti, the works are made without shaking. They rest, balancing between serious weight and playful easiness. The body of work is a result of Søndergaards’ work with the newspaper FLAMING, and the exhibition is a visual tour-de-force produced by a versatile talent.

FLAMING is a newspaper where different articles have been illustrated through painting, drawing and digital collages. Today illustrations in newspapers are often front-collages and drawings from the theatre, the court, or other places where the camera has no admission. Furthermore, a newspaper consists most of texts with matching photos – one-sited glimpses to illustrate the often many-sited texts. The newspaper FLAMING of Søndergaard has to be seen as a response to this stereotype way of using pictures in newspapers. His newspaper is an attempt to introduce light and shade into the reading of a text in a newspaper, by showing a picture as plural as the text, thus the reader is challenged to a more synestetic experience of a text and an illustration. At the same time, Søndergaards’ newspaper is an attempt to blur the hierarchical understanding of text before picture, and vice versa, so that the newspaper production is seen as a whole. In contrast to the photojournalist, who has to be faithful to what he photographs, a painting illustrator can almost allow himself to be unfaithful or maybe faithless to what he illustrates. As a painting illustrator, you can explain, caricature or tell without any documentary obligation – and thereby showing the fragility of objectivity.

The newspaper FLAMING also has to be seen as a pilot project for an experimental art paper and the hope is to make an opening for more demanding and creative ways of illustrating a text. The experimental art paper is thought of as a new forum for visualization of texts, executed by artists, designers, photographers – an idea of a different and visual challenge of the text.

Mikkel Søndergaard (born in 1976) is educated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and at the School of Design in Kolding where he received his master degree in visual communication. He has exhibited at Charlottenborg.