Kvium on the Edge

In 1985, a young graduate from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen stepped onto the street. He had spent six years learning to master the techniques of drawing, painting and sculpture in line with the old masters. Kvium’s classical training was however soon overshadowed by an artistic project that over the following 25 years has position him among the most influential artists of his generation. Along with, among others, Christian Lemmerz and Lars Nørgaard, Kvium has turned things on their head and through painting, performance and filmmaking he has establishes a universe in which classical beauty has been eclipsed by contorted aesthetics and an emphasis on the dark sides of the soul.

As early as his graduation year, 1985, his motorbike pictures gave way to a kind of pictorial ambiguity that echoes the sense of loss and perdition of 17th century Mannerism. He entered into an underworld in which classicism and orderliness gave way to organ-like excrescence and a dark and eerie undertow: "Re-generation" and anti-aesthetics. His images of protuberant outgrowths established themselves in Kvium’s idiom and up through the 1990s they were accompanied by characteristically figurative paintings whose images of diabolic distortion etch themselves into the retina: An evocative idiom that provokes a sense of fascination and leaves no one unmoved. Kvium is a divisive household name. "To be or not to be" mesmerised by Kvium’s technique in "Silent Knowledge", the symbolism in "Blind eyed painting" or cornered by his claustrophobic "Finger Point". He provokes reaction and many a father-in-law has had to concede that: “By Jove, this guy Kvium can paint.”

Most of the works on auction currently adorn the reception in the Aarhus premises and offer remarkable insight into a chapter of art that inspires constant fascination. Please note that several of the works to be auctioned will start with a minimum price only half of that of the estimate!

View the paintings here