Truly Picturesque

The photograph has been used by painters ever since the birth of the medium in the first half of the 19th century. One of the greatest Danish painters of all time, Vilhelm Hammershøi, used the photograph as a source of inspiration and model for his own artwork – from the quiet living rooms, over the desolate landscapes to the portraits and "close-up" paintings of women from his inner circle of friends.

Slow, Symbolic Pictures

The art of Hammershøi also seems to be a clear inspiration for the art photographer Trine Søndergaard's work "Guldnakke" (Gold Neck) from 2012. Both the pose, colour and choice of motif as well as the mood and feelings of melancholy and absence are clear references to Hammershøi's portraits of women with their back turned. And like Hammershøi, Søndergaard is concerned with not letting the portrayed reveal too much. The special combination of the gold-embroidered traditional 19th-century headgear contrasted with the young woman's modern clothing and beautiful bare neck creates an alluring tension and mystique that removes time and space from the image.

The documentary feel that is so characteristic of the medium is erased. Instead, the work opens up as a symbolic interior image rather than a documentation of an outer reality – just as in the paintings of Hammershøi.

"Trine Søndergaard manages to make the photograph a slow medium that appears closer to the painting than the random snapshots we all take over and over again to fill the holes in our memory," writes the curator at Arken – Museum of Modern Art, Camilla Jalving, about Søndergaard's art in the book "A Room Inside” from 2017.

Reality on A Collision Course

The snapshot is, on the other hand, a central part of the Danish contemporary artist and modern realist Allan Otte’s artwork. He uses the photograph as inspiration, while also using photo manipulation so that his work becomes collages, which eventually take the form of large abstractly realistic paintings. Here brushstrokes, airbrushing and neat lines hold the abstract collisions, planes of reality and perspectives in a tight rein.

Allan Otte's large painting "Kødet blev jord" (And the Meat Turned to Soil) is one of the highlights of the auction of modern art. The painting looks exactly like a modern Danish countryside as it passes you by in a car window on a drive across the country – a snapshot of a Danish landscape.

Soft white-grey clouds fill the background along with slightly hilly green fields and wind turbines from Vestas placed in a row. Small country roads criss-cross each other as far as the eye can see. A lonely tree, a single shrub, and white roadside pillars dot the middle ground. In the front, tombstones are lined up in rows as well – both old and new. In the middle ground one also notices a bent out of shape lamp post. Not one living being can be seen. The landscape is (just as the landscapes of Hammershøi) completely desolate.

But if you dive into the details, something happens. Reality collapses, and out of this collapse leaps abstract lines and spaces of colour in tightly composed surfaces. Sharply drawn, meticulous brush strokes collide with faded airbrush-painted tombstones and clouds, reminiscent of a blurred photograph.

It is at once unsentimental and documenting art that establishes ties to the prosaic registration of the Düsseldorf school of photography. The mood in the painting almost becomes a post-post-image – it has been cleaned of the remains of a possible dramatic accident, which is an oft-used motif by Otte. What remains are only the tombstones, bent lamp posts, roadside pillars and windmills – the meat has turned to soil.

Several Challenging Works

At the auction, we also present other paintings and photographs that challenge our senses, such as Christian Skeel's black-and-white photographic painting of a floating cloud above a black sea, or the Danish-Kuwaiti artist Lina Hashim's photographs of Muslim women with their hair released and back turned towards the camera. The bodies of the women have been edited out making them unrecognizable. The auction also presents a large painting by Cathrine Raben Davidsen of three young women posing as models in a fashion magazine – yet kept in an airy, poetic and dream-like feminine universe.

Auction: 5-6 March at Bredgade 33 in Copenhagen.

Preview: 21-25 February at the same address.

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