Kvium’s Circus Ring

Michael Kvium CIRCUS EUROPA

By curator Dea Antonsen

A One-of-a-kind Artist in Recent Danish Art History

The Danish artist Michael Kvium (born 1955) is one of a kind within recent Danish art history. Kvium is known for his sharp and raw images with caricatured creatures that are both literally and in a broader sense undressed. Kvium depicts the shadow side of life, or perhaps more precisely – he brings reality out of its hiding place in the shadows. He exposes the absurdities of life and the meaninglessness of existence through portrayals of distorted and deformed human-like creatures that are in the midst of absurd, grotesque situations and performing macabre deeds.

Kvium was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1979 to 1985. He had his breakthrough on the art scene during the 1980s with his films and performances, where he was part of the performance group called Værst (Worst). Kvium has done scenography for the theatre, exhibited worldwide and received prestigious honorary prizes. He is most famous for his characteristic figurative and performative paintings.  The foolish, the morbid, the comic and the deplorable aspects of modern western culture is what Kvium is interested in researching. The depicted figures, whose resemblance to the artist's own appearance is hard to overlook, often balance on the border between human and non-human. They can be long-limbed, bandage-bound characters hit by existential paralysis and claustrophobia in the constant negotiation between individualism and community, blind creatures incapable of seeing and acting clearly in a world filled with chaos and emptiness, or undefinable, microbial growths in connected circuits that are mutating into something unrecognizably different. 

Life as a Circus

On 2 September 2017, the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art opened the exhibition CIRCUS EUROPE. For this exhibition, Kvium has created a newly produced all-encompassing installation, where the audience is invited on a sensory, eventful walk through brand new paintings, video works, installations and sculptures. The exhibition creates one large stage for a narrative that develops from seductive entertainment to a disquieting dystopia. Through the theatrical stage, Kvium uses the exhibition to expose life as a circus and entertainment – as one great circus performance. The central figure of the narrative is the circus performer, who entertains and seduces with tricks and magic. Kvium often describes himself and his role as an artist as an entertainer. He is keenly aware of art as a parallel world in relation to reality. In the circus, as in the space created by art, we experience the clown or the animal behind the tamed human being. In CIRCUS EUROPE, Kvium unfolds the events of our contemporary society on a backdrop of circus stripes. Europe, the historic centre of all Western civilization, is in the spotlight with perpetual news items on war, terror, climate change, refugee crisis and other disasters that fill the programming and entertain us on par with all the different reality shows. We are in the middle of a circus – a sensational performance about the current course of Europe. In CIRCUS EUROPE, the images’ political topicality and Kvium's critical approach to society are more explicit than ever before.

In the Spotlight of the Circus Ring

Kvium's always carefully staged universe testifies to a great awareness of the audience’s role. A fundamental tone in Kvium's art is the absurd humour and the biting satire, which he uses to depict life's duplicity and uses it to get close to us. In CIRCUS EUROPE we step into the exhibition as a comfortable audience to art, but we are quickly met with tragicomic circus performers in theatrical installations and performative situations. They catch our gaze, perform for us and return our gaze, almost as if they are asking us whether we like the show? This contact is essential in Kvium's work, since he wants to draw us into the circus ring and establish a dialogue with us. He places a spotlight on important issues of our time, on all of us and asks, which role each of us plays in CIRCUS EUROPA?

The exhibition is open until 14 January 2018. Read more at arken.dk.

Auction and Preview

Right now, you can bid on 21 works by Michael Kvium – the final hammer will fall on Tuesday, 31 October at 8 pm. All the works are exhibited at our locations in either Copenhagen or Aarhus – where the individual work is located can be found in the description of the work on bruun-rasmussen.dk. View addresses and opening hours.

View and bid on the works by Kvium