The Power of Painting

Mie Olise Kjærgaard conquers an artistic territory deeply connected to the idea of the macho-artist: expressive, figurative, large-scale painting. Her vast canvases are composed by turbulent brush strokes, emanating fierce wildness and power. Her aesthetics are not feminine in the traditional sense – quite the contrary – her mission statement seems to be the capturing of new female territory. To expand the image of feminine freedom towards a feral, energetic field that she convincingly masters and makes her own. Through her painting, she composes a new narrative for women. A story that speaks directly into our time, where a new female generation grabs the microphone, insisting to be included in public discourse. Precisely because she is a painter, Mie Olise Kjærgaard manages to bring this story into an abstract space that also speaks beyond its time. Her images are wholly contemporary, but at the same time take place in a parallel non-time, which is that of the painting. An abstract picturesque expanse wherein Viking ships, tennis rackets and mythical animals are all entangled and intertwined in her story of the new woman.

The Composition Falters

A dragon head-embellished Viking ship sets the stage for a monumental group-portrait of women armed with tennis rackets. It resembles an unusual band press photo, some standing, others hanging head down. Wild and fun with roughly executed strokes. The motif is characteristic of Mie Olise Kjærgaard's compositional style. Her works never fail to unfold the duality of painting: that the image simultaneously refers to the external reality – and at the same time to itself as an image. Every painting is a suggestion of what painting is. And with Mie Olise Kjærgaard, the answer is that the painting is reality filtered and interpreted through a personal sensibility. In this painting, as in many others, Mie Olise Kjærgaard evokes drama from the very act of holding the picture together. The motif fills the entire plane, even the hair bristles upwards to cover the upper part of the canvas. But the composition falters. The figures sway and stand on precarious legs, feet rest on legs that stick into the air, and one character hangs from a thin stick that threatens to break at any moment. It's as if the whole picture could implode at the blink of an eye. The dynamics and tension make Mie Olise Kjærgaard's pictures fundamentally exciting to look at. Massive rhinos plowing through the paint. Women almost somersaulting to claim their place in a composition. Paint-splashes turning into speed vapors trailing her strange mythical beasts. Her works are a new and fresh take on why painting continues to fascinate us.

The Battle for the Eye

Going back in art history, figurative painting has been male dominated through centuries, and history has spawned a cascade of objectified, idealized naked women. “Men look, and women appear,” as art historian John Berger summed up in 1972. 1960s and 70s art operates in opposition to this skewed viewpoint – including in paintings with female artists developing a style wherein they paint themselves, their own bodies, in addition to both male and female models. As an artistic motif, since the 1960s, the female figure has been entangled in a battle for the eye’s attention. Who owns the female body and its meanings? In the tradition of Pablo Picasso, the female figure is sexy, dangerously seductive – his female bodies are prickly, spiky or gently wavy, and the abstract expressionist Willem De Kooning later reinterprets the motif as decidedly threatening – monumental female figures in outrageous, busty compositions. Both painters have since been seen as exponents of a tradition that links painting to a macho ideology promoted by heterosexual masculine energy, objectifying women. It is against this backdrop that subsequent generations of female artists seek to reclaim the female body and images of women in general. By replacing the male gaze with the female gaze.

The Female Gaze

Several female artists work to depict the female body as it is experienced by the person who wears it. For example, the painter Maria Lassnig. Her brutal self-portraits show the body as a carnal sheath. The physical starting point of being alive, simply, for better or for worse. At its extreme, in a self-portrait, where she is naked, and with a fierce look towards the viewer, holding a gun to her temple. Here, the body is exhibited in all its horror – as the existential on and off switch that closely connects life and death.

Mie Olise Kjærgaard inherits untamedness from this tradition of painting. But she delivers her very own take on it, and, partly, therein lies her originality. We are confronted with strong gazes in the canvasses. Active women in sportswear and flip-flops. Gathered in groups or riding full speed on enormous mythical beasts. Tennis as a motif, for instance. An entire series of paintings dedicated to this sport. In one of them, a group of women all dressed in matching blue dresses, with their black hair worn up. All facing the viewer with an insistent look in their eyes, holding tennis rackets as were they weapons. In another, four women are riding a hammerhead shark full-bore, their hair dancing erratically in the wind, one of them playing the racket as an electric guitar. A strong image of community, of women being present for the sake of women. Gaze entirely reclaimed. The racket is a banal everyday motif in paintings that are otherwise set against abstract backgrounds or populated by mythical animals. It is included as a reference to the liberating power of sports – the feeling of mastering one's own body as a lived experience associated with movement, activity and vitality. An earlier series of works deals with the Suffragette movement and the fight for women's self-determination and the right to vote. The interest in sports and women's bodily expression stems from this historical context. Because the showdown with the view of women as being fragile and the right to exercise as an acceptable element in women's life is part of the modern period's struggle for women's freedom.

The New Mother Figure

Significantly – and typical of a generation – Mie Olise Kjærgaard's pictures are populated by mothers. In recent years, the mother figure appears in the works of several international painters, often in pictures where everyday childcare is displaced into a mythical parallel universe. The painter Camille Henrot interprets the experience of becoming a mother in pictures of coyotes, birds and cats. And in the series Shit Mom, Tala Madani depicts a mother figure covered in shit, in which she increasingly smears her children. In Mie Olise Kjærgaard's paintings, mother and child are usually on the move – but the bicycle with a kid’s seat attached is replaced by large savage animals.

The maternal figure is back, but sans the social realist undertone that characterized the 1970s feminist depiction of motherhood. The new generation of painters filters its experiences through a fantastical universe that seeks to capture aspects of motherhood in a poetic language that only art can deliver. These artists invent an unprecedented visual language in which to frame the special experience of motherhood that belongs to a new generation of women.

Wild Ride

It is striking how subdued the story of the mother is in visual arts history. The Madonna and Child, resting peacefully is a powerful figure that has influenced art throughout the modern period and has only been seriously disrupted by feminist art. Now, Mie Olise Kjærgaard has added a new and exciting chapter. In a particularly tender image, mother and child ride an enormous beast. Its body is so furiously untamed that it barely has shape. Large, brown brushstrokes make out the ears, legs and tail. The huge, white teeth are roughly painted onto the face. And on the back of the strange animal, the child wraps its arms around its mother as they move forward at full tilt. What are we witnessing here? The journey through everyday-existence? Through life? The close connection between the two, and the untamed primordial power that flows from the beast beneath them, makes the image a statement of love, togetherness and strength.

In another painting, a pregnant woman hangs from the reins of an animal running. The power seems immense. What is that supposed to be? The tension between the ordinary woman in shorts and flip flops and the enormous mythical beast lends a humorous tone to the image. Is it stubbornness depicted here? The physical primal power of the pregnant woman? The struggle to navigate everyday life with children? Precisely because the images remain as open as they do, they retain their power of fascination. There is something liberating and uplifting about Mie Olise Kjærgaard's insistence on letting these mother and child motifs inhabit the dynamic spaces of these gigantic paintings. She captures the expressive power of gestural painting in a female world of experience. And reinterprets the maternal figure miles beyond the modest Madonna. Her mothers are powerful figures on a wild hunt, into the future.