Cecilie Norgaard, Cave Painting (Installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2024. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Press release, January 2024
Matteo Cantarella is pleased to present Cave Painting, Cecilie Norgaard’s first exhibition with the gallery, and her first solo exhibition in Denmark. Bringing together this new body of work for the first time, Cave Painting continues Norgaard’s inquiry into the medium of painting as a vast analytical space. Coalescing abstraction and figuration, her rigorously rendered canvases incorporate traditional painting techniques with an inherent conceptual sensibility to consider implications between aesthetics, artistic production and socio-economic living conditions. The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by Adrienne Herr.
The paintings that comprise Cave Painting are suffused with images of monumental columns, conveyor belts, windmills, cargo vessels and vehicles bursting through the eery stillness of a landscape on edge. As if they were stills extrapolated from one hazy, febrile vision, the works share a cohesive perceptual and emotional content when observed together – recognisable forms peak through the background, revealing a place between the world and its remnants. To prevent the viewer from settling on an idealised perspective, the scenes are further framed by a muddy, organic scenario of subtle brown and red. The distinction between before and after, cause and effect feel indiscernible in the face of exhaustion.
Cecilie Norgaard, Cave Painting (Installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2024. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard, Untitled (tempera and oil on canvas). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard, Untitled (tempera and oil on canvas). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard, Untitled (tempera and oil on canvas). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
In her ongoing practice, Norgaard’s has been intrinsically dealing with legibility in visual forms, building and weaving together a vocabulary of recurring signs and images. While some exist on an immediate surface level – whether we catch the sight of a brick, a cardboard box or a flower – others linger in a more interpretative, superimposed perimeter. However assimilated, these impressions are not mutually exclusive neither categorical but are encouraged to coinhabit a fragmented plurality which tantalisingly reinforces the porosity of the medium, and in reflection, of ourselves.
Cecilie Norgaard, Cave Painting (Installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2024. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard, Untitled (tempera and oil on canvas). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard, Untitled (tempera and oil on canvas). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Norgaard approaches painting as a structural discipline, a system that reflects exclusively through itself. There is a wry composure since, rather than thematising her work, she questions the conditions of the medium and its semantic implications through its very own conventional formats. Leveraging this very defined space, she unpacks the analytical latitude of her work within the paradigmatic unity of what unambiguously constitutes a painting.
Cecilie Norgaard, Cave Painting (Installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2024. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard, Untitled (tempera and oil on canvas). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard, Untitled (tempera and oil on canvas). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard, Cave Painting (Installation view). Matteo Cantarella, 2024. Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Ultimately, her subversion lies not in the rejection of the form – which is instead sublimed in its implementation – but in the ability to challenge the familiar through a cadenced, lavish substrate of analogies. These images carry the implications of the medium, and the frictions between the pictorial surface and the materiality of the forms: the boxes, the squares and the paintings.
Cecilie Norgaard, Untitled (tempera and oil on canvas). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard, Untitled (tempera and oil on canvas). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard, Untitled (tempera and oil on canvas). Photo: Courtesy the artist & Matteo Cantarella.
Cecilie Norgaard (b. 1991, Denmark) is a Danish artist living and working in Vienna, Austria. Norgaard graduated from the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (2021) in Vienna, Austria. Her work has been exhibited at mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna, Austria), Galerie PCP (Paris, France), Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (Copenhagen, Denmark), Rinde am Rhein (Düsseldorf, Germany), Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna, Austria) and at Select (Berlin, Germany), among others.
Exhibition period: January 19 - March 9, 2024
More info: Matteocantarella.net