Marie Irmgard Birkedal

Marie Irmgard Birkedal describes, not without provocation, her attitude as one of ‘passive astonishment’ that she cultivates in her painting, articulated between historical points of reference such as Diego Velázquez, Yoko Ono, or Cy Twombly. For her, looking closely is more important than judging. Painting means waiting and condensing in order to create time. In doing so, she moves between concretion in the pictorial and the visual question that challenges abstraction.
In her use of colour, she employs a broad vocabulary that is characterised by the different options between a strong impasto, in which the colours are applied thickly and hardly mixed, and delicate glazes, in which acrylic paint is used as in watercolour, or combined with linseed oil as the painting medium with a long drying time. This gives her paintings a subtle repertoire of expressive means: the mixing and interpenetration of colours, the structuring of backgrounds, deliberately provoked tears of colour, cracks, craquelures, or rhizomatic effects that project a fine work of lines which can again become the origin of new order.
What it means to take over this or that form of life, how things could be differently all of this can be explored by adding, taking away, blurring, overlaying layers. Day and night are almost levelled in our way of life – Birkedal makes the contrast of light and dark re-readable when she gives new meaning to the darker valeurs with light glazes and alabaster-like translucent bodies of colour.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2020 Marie Irmgard Birkedal – Hard Earned Innocence, Lyngby Funstforening, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
2018 Marie Irmgard Birkedal – Savage Glitter II: Interiors + Territories, Galerie1214, Berlin
2018 Marie Irmgard Birkedal – Savage Glitter, Galerie 1214, Berlin
2011 Johnny Cash was mine exactly two decades before he was yours, Galleri NB, Viborg, Denmark
2010 Blow Up – Marie Irmgard Birkedal, Lyngby Funstforening, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2019 alternative facts, Laura Mars, Berlin
2018 Romantic Troopers, Lage Egal, Berlin
2018 Come from Painting, Galerie1214, Berlin
2017 Accrochage, Galerie1214, Berlin
2014 Nordisk Salong 2014, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg, Sweden