Through painting, Anette Harboe Flensburg depicts sensorial and existential experiences. Her works are often held in strong, clear colors and the rooms that materialize in the paintings shiver on the border between the realistic, the architectonically defined, and the dissolving impossible. With a starting point in small, spatial models, provided with plexiglass and pervaded with light, Anette Harboe Flensburg finds her motifs which she photographs and translates into painting, often in a large immersive scale. The different media engage in a subtle dialogue with each other, and the final work is a result of a negotiation that points back toward the artist’s perspective. Geometrical shapes consume the spaces and are affected by sharp distinctions between light and shadow. Reflections on the floors and ceilings create motific echoes and sometimes nature is pictured as seen from a distance, a blurred view behind the windows, establishing a distinction between the inside and outside.
Anette Harboe Flensburg’s works are snapshots, fleeting sense impressions, and yet, frozen in time. The motifs are consistently empty of people. A loneliness is visualized and paradoxically it fills the rooms with an intense presence of something else; a bodily, emotional, and intellectual resonance that connects the inner life with a physical expression. The clear lights and deep colors and the insisting study of the architectonical space encapsulates atmospheres and feelings that are approaching the intangible in a fragile construction.
Anette Harboe Flensburg (1961, DK) has a degree from The School of Art and Design in Kolding and has studied Philosophy at The University of Copenhagen. Latest, she has had solo exhibitions at The Nivaagaard Collection, Johannes Larsen Museum, Skovgaard Museum, and Trapholt Museum of Art and Design, among others. Anette Harboe Flensburg has created decorations for public spaces such as The Patient Hotel at The National Hospital of Denmark, The Copenhagen Supreme Court, and Johan Borup’s School. She has received The New Carlsberg Foundation’s Artist Award and the Eckersberg Medal and she has published several books.
Selected solo exhibitions:
Også i Arkadien kan du dø - Gl. Strand, 2021
TRÆERNE FINDES, Nivågaard Malerisamling, 2021
TRÆERNE FINDES, Johannes Larsen Museet, 2021
TRÆERNE FINDES, Skovgaard Museet, 2021
In Compay With No One, Trapholt, 2020
La poétique de l’espace, Maison Du Danemark, 2017
Untitled, 2014
Theatai, 2020
In timelessness there is no room for remembrance, 2020
Untitled #2, 2005
The house in the World, the World in the House, 2018
Another perspective, a new opening, Johan Borups Højskole, 2019
Træerne findes, Johannes Larsen Museum, Kerteminde, 2021
A Room Of Her Own, Nordvest, 2022
Træerne findes, Nivaagaard, 2021
At bygge rum der ikke findes, Patienthotellet, 2016