Galleri Tom Christoffersen

Bodil Nielsen It may make sense to regard Bodil Nielsen's works in relation to classical concepts in painting – references to color field or formal questions about the figure/ground relation. But it also makes sense to pursue a different path, namely the allusions to design and architecture. Not least because Bodil Nielsen is part of a generation, which has been interested in lifting painting from a tradition and a history that has, at times, been both restraining and excluding – for both artist and viewer. And this trans-medial strategy, in particular, has been one of the tools used in the attempt to equalize hierarchies and introduce painting on a par with other pictorial modes of expression (…). Bodil Nielsen's pictures express a kind of painting that provides space – does not take space. This is emphasized in the open composition where the shimmering fields of color are not sharply drawn, and where the fulcrum is often outside the pictorial space – as if the painting was a random sample of a greater context, which spreads in all directions, as apparent in the characteristic horizontal and vertical section. On the face of it, it is not an obvious cocktail – mixing a popular, functional genre with a type of painting, which is far more floating and sensitive, and which invites absorption. But nevertheless, it is this particular alloy that gives character to Bodil Nielsen's paintings and results in the shimmeringly formal and sensually social fields of color. Functional and poetic. Extract from FUNCTION AND ABSORPTION by Pernille Albrethsen 2003. Translated by Lotte Follin. Full text in English / Danish (PDF)


	2008-2010
biography (PDF)	2007
	public art / commissions