Triple Axel

On February 16, 1991, Tonya Harding slid out onto the ice of the Target Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota for the U.S. Nationals Figure Skating Championships. That day, Harding planned to land the triple axel, a treacherously difficult jump that would require her to make three-and-a-half revolutions mid-air. It had never before been executed by an American woman in competition. Working-class, tomboyish, and less polished than her peers, Harding believed that she was frequently deprived of top scores because of classist bias amongst the judges. In her calculation, the indisputable achievement of the triple axel would guarantee her the gold. Before the start of the music, Harding glided to the middle of the rink in a V-necked, silky turquoise leotard adorned with a flouncy spat of fabric around the waist. 40 seconds into the routine, she bent her legs at sharp 90 degree angles, crossed her arms and lifted off into the air, achieving the unthinkable in a split-second frenetic blur of motion, a feat of physical precarity. She earned the #1 spot that day.

Harding was a woman who hovered at the edge of respectability, only finding institutional accolades through unmatchable acts of athleticism. Her form, knife-like and rebellious, endures as an image of muscular determination. Like Harding on the ice, Mie Olise Kjaergaard's recent paintings are populated by a cast of wild-haired, limber amazons that ask us to consider female athleticism as a riposte to norms of acceptability. Kjaergaard's figures are unbridled performers arranged before us in various tableaux. They occupy boxy, staged mise-en-scène pointedly oriented to the audience and, in groups or teams, vigorously enact various sporty occupations, including lifting weights, spiking volleyballs, jumping hurdles, and bounding across tennis courts. The atmosphere and settings around them are rendered in jewel tones of bright pink, forest green, and turquoise. Long limbed, lean, and tanned to a dark brown, these women wear bikinis, tennis whites, and sports bras. Like Harding in her girly costume, there is a certain frisson between the trappings of femininity that spangle their forms and the jutting lines and fierce gestures of the musculature underneath. Eventually, chaos ensues.

In Four in a Row, 2023, a quartet of nearly identical bodies occupy the points of a diamond shape on a tall rectangular canvas. Each is mid-leap, about to rocket over a black-and-white-striped hurdle. With legs spread wide at acute right angles, the geometric razor edge of their limbs is echoed in the thatches of long brown hair that erupt vertically from their heads in long shafts of disarray. Their eyebrows too are jutting dashes and the jolting black shadows below each figure emphasize this angularity as do the crisscrossing grids of fencing that line the upper corners of the piece. A violently pink track field rendered in big bold strokes and swooshes of pigment adds to the staccato energy of the composition. Sharp as blades, there is no doubt of the leapers' dominance, of the inevitability that they will land on the other side of each flimsy barrier.

Muscle Beach Ready Action, 2023, another large-scale work, features a cast of the same characters, this time gathered on a sandy palm-tree lined court, flexing their musculature and lifting weights. The coastal setting is inspired by the artist's recent sojourn in Venice, California where bodybuilders gather to flex and pump iron oceanside. Two large poseurs in the foreground show off classic poses, curling their biceps and flexing their hamstrings for the viewer. Their rectangular pumping ground takes on the quality of a theater stage, with us on the other side of the fourth wall, menaced by their economically rendered eyebrows and curled fists. The sunny, yellow-hued scene is tempered by a preponderance of protruding shadows, including those of the spiky-topped palms that surround them and the large angular shadows of the women themselves.

Team sports make an appearance in Beachy Volley, 2023, a high-speed volleyball game played by opposing sides of two players. A figure at the right-hand edge of the canvas jumps vertically, arms piercing the air, attempting to block a ball that is hurtling toward us. As in the previous works discussed, Kjaergaard puts us right up close to the action, with large forms occupying the foreground, a device that leaves little separation between her painted world and the real one. It is not only the women's untamed hair and agile poses that imbue the painting with dynamism. The artist's unblended, wide brushstrokes create a sense of gestural verve in the surrounding atmosphere. The court itself is composed of crisscrossing swoops and washes of deep turquoise, resembling the turbulent surface of a stormy sea. The action is not simply in the scene rendered, but in the frenzied application of pigment that brought it into being.

This frenetic energy intensifies even more in the monumental work Tennis Trouble Makers, 2023, in which a dozen women and two canines create pandemonium on a large green court. No longer engaging with the rules of play, these characters feverishly climb the net and tall umpire's chairs, brandish tennis rackets like weapons, and throw around bright yellow balls, some of which are absconded by racing dogs. The piece is so large it takes on the immersive effect of a nineteenth-century panoramic painting. The wide, gridded, and bright white tennis net juts up against the bottom edge, with the nearly life size bodies seemingly about to leap into our space. Almost all of the figures in the foreground move toward us with their angular legs wildly spread, a carefree and confrontational kind of unshielded embodiment. Here, Kjaergaard's players are utterly unbounded and feral, displaying exercises in physical precarity as proof of strength, but, more importantly, unselfconsciousness. The artist's performative fantasy of female strength and athleticism is as much an exaltation of sinewy resolve as it is a dream for a feminine body free of shame.

Originally published in Mie Olise Kjærgaard: GAMECHANGER, FOUNDRY SEOUL, March 18, 2024.