Exploring Kvium

There is no doubt that Michael Kvium has cut a prominent figure as one of the most striking contemporary artists in Denmark for many years now. With his very own absurd idiom, adding a dash of black humour, he nails all variations of human folly in the most provocative and boundary-pushing way. Kvium’s gallery of characters is readily recognisable, and the abnormal humanoid figures are always representatives of perversions, diseases and madness of all kinds. We are invited inside the gloomy, scary nooks and crannies of the human mind – a universe that arouses revulsion and fascination at the same time.

Perversions and lumps of flesh

In the 1980s Kvium was mainly into extreme perversions, but towards the end of that decade, the allegorical representations with truncated and perverted women and men gave way to the equally characteristic flesh-like excrescences and chicken-like monstrosities. This is also the case in the work “Venstreorienteret maleri” (left-wing painting), which with its three organic and virtually identical lumps of flesh and the wording “Lighed er frihed” (equality is freedom) can be regarded as a comment on the politically correct 1970s, which Kvium fiercely opposed.

1990s madness

In the early 1990s, he focuses more on themes such as madness and the ridiculous, and his paintings are populated by a great many repulsive human figures with deformities of all kinds. The figures are often placed on a stage as if they were actors in a play, thrust brashly into the spotlight and revealing every aspect of their degeneration. This is evident in the disturbing works “Indviklet forbindelse” (“complicated connection”) from 1992 and the slightly later “Fatass” from 1999, where the deformities know no bounds.

The pale birchwood

In the 2000s, Kvium presents a new type of painting in which nature and the towering, bare and thin birch trees have displaced the grotesque atmosphere of his earlier works with a roaring silence. These are empty landscapes – like dark wastelands – but they are no less eerie. Kvium’s familiar grotesque figures crop up in some of them, as is the case with the work up for auction, “Another Tailwind”, which is one of his main works from this period.

The androgynous old character

The last of the Kvium works in the auction,"Keep Dreaming", returns to his earlier theme of blindness, which he introduced in the early 1990s. We encounter the almost androgynous old character, in this case dressed in a lemon-yellow dress with black spots. The figure has one breast exposed, and in the shadow on the wall, a stream of breast milk flows from the breast. The contradictions in this painting are obvious, as is often the case in Kvium’s universe:

“I create an absolute morphing of man and woman, foetus and old person, and fat and thin. The second I put hair on a figure, it becomes apparent whether he/she is a lawyer or a church mouse. I want to avoid that. I want to create a body that anyone can step into or out of – like the fictional characters in a novel. I make each of my figures an ‘it’ in order to create distance from them.”

Welcome to the repulsive and yet fascinating universe of Kvium!

View all items including in the auction

Preview: 22 - 26 September

Auction: 27 September - 4 October