Anne Kampmann

Anne Kampmann has long worked with painting, woodcuts and objects. In her work, in continuation of modernism, she has developed her own design language in which animals and human figures are inserted into simplified landscapes. She uses distortions, in that animals, vegetation and landscapes are shaped so that the images become emblematic and so that lines and surfaces form simple and airy image ornaments. Kampmann expresses his visions with aesthetic economy, the pictures are cleaned of superfluous details and are of the type that work well as book illustrations, as posters and as decoration.

It is easy to see that a picture is made by Anne Kampmann, but the reason why we enter into a dialogue with them so quickly is that she is based on established traditions from the last hundred years of visual art. These are not ironic, postmodern quotes. In Anne Kampmann, features from German expressionism (in Blaue Reiter bottling), symbolism and surrealism, in form and feeling are reworked in her mind so that she can create her own style with these tools.

Within the circle of what we call the Blaue Reiter (after a picture of a blue rider painted by Kandinsky), there are a number of strange, almost ecstatically beautiful paintings by Franz Marc, one of the young artists who died at the front during the First World War. In his images of blue and red horses and golden deer, the motifs are split up and tied together so that a coherent life force flows through everything in the image. Although Kampmann's pictures are not similar to Marc's - hers are more "primitive" and raw in shape and the color is broken and muted - there is a parallel. For in Marc's pictures, a visual form is given to a common destiny between animals and humans, between organic and inorganic life. This identification with everything living is one of the basic moods in Kampmann's pictures. And although Anne Kampmann's form language is not avant-garde, in the sense of radically innovative, she shares the international avant-garde's project in that she focuses on parts of life that we do not usually notice in daily life. Avant-garde art is always created as a more or less aggressive alternative to the purpose rationality of bourgeois society, where everything must be priced, where everything must be controlled and where everything must "pay off".

Art therefore often makes room for what is hidden from the eyes of the efficient worker and functionary, for what has interest and value in itself. If you see that a tree is something created and not just something that can be used as fuel or building material, you may also be able to hear a wolf cry or take the time to walk on quiet paths. Anne Kampmann's exhibition provides just such a chance to follow the animals' marvelous lives and the world in which only themselves appear. Kampmann's pictures are often accompanied by poetic and subtle tilers. This is what it's all about: The stars are lit, Someone must be a wolf, Reveikon, The animal is, Blessing…

The press is invited to see the exhibition on Thursday 11 March at 11.00 in the Lyche pavilion. The artist will be present.

For further information, please contact:
Åsmund Thorkildsen, tel. 32 20 09 31/97 50 04 45