Kathrine Ærtebjerg | Grothcollection

Kathrine Ærtebjerg (Born 1969), lives and works in Copenhagen. She works with painting in an expanded field and her artistic work extends over painting, paperwork, objects and sound.

Ærtebjerg's works are often associated with an adventurous and dreamy universe, where inner life meets external circumstances, and where fabulous figures encounter everyday things such as keys, vegetables or clothespins that form part of the motifs in new and surprising ways.

In Ærtebjerg's universe, nothing is what it appears to be. Well-known things transform before the eyes of the viewer, and precisely the ambiguity is a pervasive element. The paintings lure us into a, at first glance, innocent and charming pictorial world, but in the works existential themes, poetry and emotional intensity can coexist with insidious ferocity and subtle humor.

Characteristic of some of the newer paintings is the way Ærtebjerg has worked with a form of negative space, where the non-visible is brought out, which evokes memories of the oldest form of photography, cyanotypy, or of modern technologies such as X-rays or MRI scans that illuminate the body and reveal broken bones, diseases and internal physical conditions that cannot be immediately seen, but may be felt and felt. It is almost as if the works have been placed in a magical potion that evokes invisible aspects and connecting lines that we cannot see with the naked eye, but which can still be extremely important.

Kathrine Ærtebjerg is educated at Det Kgl. Danish Academy of Arts, 1995-2002. She lives and works in Copenhagen, has received several honorary grants and is represented in a number of the country's largest museums such as the Statens Museum for Art, ARoS, Arken and in the New Carlsberg Foundation's collection.

Ærtebjerg participated together with a group of Danish artists in the decoration of Frederik Vlll's Palace at Amalienborg (inaugurated 2010).