Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> That Artebjerg’s work is concerned with childhood is self-evident. Not only do the figures she depicts often look childlike but they are befriended by animal familiars like the protagonists of fairy tales and cartoons. We can allow this childlike aspect to charm us but that does not mean that as viewers we can curselves afford to adopt a false naivete in our own approach to the pain- tings. What would constitute such a naive approach? Two possibilities either to approach the paintings with an affected innocence as if they were inviting sos to play some beguiling but inconsequential game with them or to approach them in the pompous spirit of a pretentious maturity that imagines that it is above all these childish concerns. One approach misses the point as much as the other although at least the first might be more fun. But either one would miss the subtle ambivalence of the work. That’s the perspective that allows one to enser the work as perhaps its maker did-in a spirit that is at once sophisticated and innocent earnest and whimsical analytical and imaginative adult and childtike. And the contrary spirit of the adolescent is not entirely absent from thent ethet. Artelijerg’s are paintings for people who have forgotten neither that have grown up nor that they have been children. From this perspective maturity does not distance us from the children we were so much as it deepens our understanding of them. We experience childhood only in retrospect. This double perspective is of the essence of ?rtebjerg’s art. It has been well said that in her work We are not presented with a clearly defined meaning but rather the possible the undecided and the ambiguous. I would only add this important proviso that the ambiguity that emerges from these paintings has nothing to do with vagueness it is the kind of ambiguity in which two distinct levels of experience come together in a complex unity. Another example of this complexity of attitude in Artebjerg’s work: The coexistence of emotional intensity and Humor lyricism and irony. Shouldn’t they interfere with one Another each undermining the effect of the other? So we expect. But I don’t see that happening Instead the co-presence of seemingly contradictory qualities Pulps Imbise the paintings with a sense of enigma. ?rtebjerg’s humor somehow both disrupts the oneira atmosphere that otherwise enwraps the paintings and at the same time of rather in a second take perhaps even in retrospect – Intensifies it. (MP)