Mie Olise Kjærgaard

Look at Us

By Lilly Wei

Lilly Wei (b. Chengdu, China) is a New York-based independent curator, writer, journalist and critic whose area of interest is global contemporary art, in particular emerging art and artists, writing frequently on international exhibitions and biennials. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications world-wide and she is a longtime contributor to Art in America, a contributing editor at ARTnews, and a former contributing editor at Art Asia Pacific in the United States. The author of numerous catalogs and monographs, she has curated exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Wei lectures frequently on critical and curatorial practices and sits on the board and advisory councils of several not-for-profit art organizations. She has an MA in art history from Columbia University, New York.

Birdrider with Flip Flops (2022) is one vivid instance of an action-packed painting by the Danish painter Mie Olise Kjærgaard (who also makes sculptures and works with installations of similar verve and intensity). It depicts a young woman – one of the artist’s high-spirited, fearless heroines – her hair streaming freely, exhilaratingly behind her, confidently astride a long-beaked bird, grasping its neck, its wingspan cut-off by the edges of the canvas. Both are rushing toward us, looking determinedly at us, compelling us to look at them. The palette is mostly shades of browns, blues, and blacks, relieved by a swath of peach and azure, the bird’s beak and plumage, the ground neutral.

Exuberant brush marks characterize her paintings: quick, expressive, explosive strokes, often horizontal, sometimes broad, sometimes skinny, squiggled, the paint that sometimes drips from them reminding us of their materiality, of process. These skeins of paint also point to the artist’s hand and the work’s incipience, of something that perpetually is coming into being before our eyes. The mark making is assured (after all Kjærgaard has been painting for more than three decades, since she was fifteen) as seen in an astonishingly vivid rhinoceros, Rhinoriding with Yellow Shadows (2022), that is, in the end, a sleight-of-hand heap of gray strokes, accented by a few dabs of black and white, ridden bareback by a daredevil of a brown-skinned girl (all her women ride bareback; all of them vibrant with incalculable energy). There is also Sisters Set on New Horizons (2022), depicting an equally enormous beast concocted from iridescent green strokes that evoke an armored carapace more than fur, its white fangs – four simple rapid downstrokes – truly ferocious, commandeered by two young women, one urging the creature on, the other lying back, insouciantly reading. Kjærgaard creates an uncanny sense of propulsion, her figures often at the edge of the foreground, precariously balanced, as if they might tip forward into our space at any minute, jumping into the room with us.