Michael Kvium
28 Jan - 17 Apr 2006
MICHAEL KVIUM
"Jaywalking Eyes"
January 28 – April 17, 2006
With works covering the whole of the artist’s production, the exhibition MICHAEL KVIUM JAYWALKING EYES is the largest presentation so far of Michael Kviums (b. 1955) oeuvre. With over 100 paintings – the oldest from 1984 and the most recent specially executed for this event at ARoS – the exhibition reveals Michael Kvium’s virtuoso world of images and occupies a space of just under 1500 square metres in the Special Exhibition Gallery and the West Gallery at ARoS. In Kvium’s pictorial universe we are taken on a journey into the raw humanity behind the façade, and this journey is both horrifying, sombre, garish and fatal – but also marked by great humour and, perhaps most important, recognition. If we both delight in and shudder at Kvium’s motifs, it is because we also recognize ourselves in these grotesque and absurd situations. JAYWALKING EYES is based on a number of sequences that explore various motifs across the whole of Kvium’s oeuvre. A “jaywalker” in modern English means someone who crosses a street “carelessly or in an illegal manner so as to be endangered by traffic”. When we cannot be sure that we are really of sound mind, indeed when not even our eyes can assure us that we know the place we occupy in the world, we are on our way to the state in which many of the figures in Kvium’s painting seem to find themselves. Jaywalking Eyes is a quotation from James Joyce (1882-1941), who like Kvium was fascinated by the kaleidoscopic, schizoid and many-facetted picture of the world that is characteristic of insanity. It is this picture of the world we meet in the exhibition JAYWALKING EYES.
"Jaywalking Eyes"
January 28 – April 17, 2006
With works covering the whole of the artist’s production, the exhibition MICHAEL KVIUM JAYWALKING EYES is the largest presentation so far of Michael Kviums (b. 1955) oeuvre. With over 100 paintings – the oldest from 1984 and the most recent specially executed for this event at ARoS – the exhibition reveals Michael Kvium’s virtuoso world of images and occupies a space of just under 1500 square metres in the Special Exhibition Gallery and the West Gallery at ARoS. In Kvium’s pictorial universe we are taken on a journey into the raw humanity behind the façade, and this journey is both horrifying, sombre, garish and fatal – but also marked by great humour and, perhaps most important, recognition. If we both delight in and shudder at Kvium’s motifs, it is because we also recognize ourselves in these grotesque and absurd situations. JAYWALKING EYES is based on a number of sequences that explore various motifs across the whole of Kvium’s oeuvre. A “jaywalker” in modern English means someone who crosses a street “carelessly or in an illegal manner so as to be endangered by traffic”. When we cannot be sure that we are really of sound mind, indeed when not even our eyes can assure us that we know the place we occupy in the world, we are on our way to the state in which many of the figures in Kvium’s painting seem to find themselves. Jaywalking Eyes is a quotation from James Joyce (1882-1941), who like Kvium was fascinated by the kaleidoscopic, schizoid and many-facetted picture of the world that is characteristic of insanity. It is this picture of the world we meet in the exhibition JAYWALKING EYES.