A Magical Geography / Antonio D’Avossa, Curator, Art Critic and Professor of Art, Art Academy in Milan, Italy
The art of Birgitte Lund is an accomplished example of the combination of geometry and material, color and line, expression and syntax, rules and chance, dynamically articulated in complete balance.
There are clear references to modern art history. Mark Rothko, graffiti art, art brut and new
expressionism are certain highlights of these references. Birgitte Lund’s painting establishes itself in this lineage through insight into the manipulation of form and a fundamental love of color that provides a setting for a conjunction that always appears central to the artwork. It is precisely this conjunction that activates the many contrasts and elements contained in the work.
The forms within each painting, arranged on a textured surface, lead the viewer from the surroundings to the center of the composition. This magical geography, derived from the first fundamental dream, that of the need to paint, yields crosses, squares, rectangles curved lines, small shapes, paper pieces, photographs and newspaper clippings as focal landmarks on the painting’s territory.
Colors are combined with light and expressed in the most poetic way through her paintings. From the cool and often fluorescent color sense of Nordic painting (green, grey, blue) we travel effortlessly to a warm color palette (earth, red, yellow, orange). These colors stem from a warmer universe with visions of places that the artist has often visited in the East, particularly India. It is this widening horizon, the equilibrium between colors and between lines and form, which relates this work to physical (and silent) mandalas, where the balance of all things rediscovers a human dimension.
It is also here that her work finds its special character. It strives to find a meeting point in the same territory between two conceptual forms. Two conceptual forms that are separate and have been in contrast to each other for the whole of cultural history and therefore in the history of painting. A separateness that formed the essence of what two of the greatest painters of the last half of the twentieth century (Mark Rothko and Yves Klein) sought to express through classical painting – the physical and the spiritual. It is this conjunction that Birgitte Lund traverses with her work.