Born 1974 | Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark
The sumptuous and often raucous recent canvases of Mie Olise Kjærgaard (b. 1974) explore historical and contemporary understandings of femininity, women’s roles, and women’s representation in art and politics. In her early paintings, the Danish artist, who studied architecture before turning to art, centered on the built environment. She depicted actual utopian structures and dystopian fictions with series inspired by a deserted amusement park in East Berlin, an abandoned Soviet-era coal-mining town in the North Pole, and an invented flooded world called Moirania. To paint the latter body of work, she incorporated polluted water sourced from the Gowanus Canal in New York, where she had a studio for many years. In 2019, Kjærgaard initiated Disobedient Muses, shifting her focus to different waves of feminism.
In the years since, she has painted scenes inspired by the Suffragettes, the Women’s liberation movement, and Les Insoumuses, a French women’s collective that produced videos on the struggles of women in the 1970s. These series have become increasingly fantastical, with wildly athletic women and witches riding flying horses, dragons, and rhinoceroses. Gangs of women play tennis-racquet-guitars on Viking ships, or ride skateboards over each other’s bodies. They wear theatrical hats, topknots, or unruly, childlike hairstyles, and they often stare directly at the viewer, confronting the gaze with tense composure. Her deft treatment of eyes—intimately communicative despite their simplicity—is reminiscent of Chantal Joffe’s, and her bold linework recalls a jittery version of Alice Neel’s. Across her paintings, Kjærgaard employs a preferred palette of muted, neutral tones that erupt into rich mustard yellow, pink, and ultramarine blue. Her canvases are characterized by a brisk gestural immediacy and vibrant energy, with large brush strokes, drips, and layers. She achieves formal precision with few wellplaced, toothsome strokes, treating her medium with an assured, yet temperate irreverence.
