Mikael Hansen
Member of:
Kunstnersamfundet (Artist Society in Denmark)
Billedkunstnernes Forbund BKF (Union of Visual Artists)
Art on the Way (in cooperation with Dongjo Yoo, South Korea)
Minister of Ecology of the Motorways in the free state Ladonia, Kullen, Sweden
Mikael Hansen has found his place among the nomads of art who practice with equal ease in different environments and cultures all over the planet. His spectrum is wide and ranges from the monumental, almost brutal Kreuz des Südens over the poetic interplay with nature in River Dance to the minimal concept of Burned Horizontal Verticals, Too Much Art and Reserve.
And in every case the titles are an integral part of the works; they grow so to speak out of the work as the ideas take form; they are crystallized and become code words for both artist and spectator.
Mikael Hansen is an orderly person. He has an innate love of symmetry and clarity. To this he can add his training as a graphicist with the resulting natural emphasis on the line, on vertical and horizontal, black and white – and the space between. But even in his early works the line becomes three-dimensional in the form of poles, posts and trunks, yet without quite losing contact with the graphic, with its role as line against a background, not of paper, but of neutral space. This does not mean that the background as such is empty; only that its role in relation to the “line” is emptiness irrespective of how green, beautiful and alive the space is. But with his growing commitment to this space, to his own physical surroundings, comes an analysis of these components, of the natural and the artificial – and of the unseen ordinariness. The next step is the need to create works that directly or conceptually involve themselves in the issues nature/culture, constraint/freedom, clash/symbiosis, ethics and aesthetics.
Until 1993 he mainly worked in galleries with installations which in various ways are contributions – often polemic – to the debate on man’s relations with nature. Alongside this he conducted studies and experiments in Vestskoven: short-lived works where he looks back and uses photography to try to capture time in the present, the frozen second – or eternity – against the background of the shifting faces of the seasons.
The major works of the past decade in Danish and foreign landscapes have shown his ability to underscore the character of the place by using local materials and with respect for culture and tradition. The result is that today he moves freely between the possibilities available to the artist who wants to comment on the conditions of the place – and of life – whether in directly aesthetics ways or indirectly and conceptually. With his experience and artistic treatment of very different tasks (f.ex. he has build an exhibition interior at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg). Mikael Hansen’s art is proof of the fruitfulness of the interaction between different areas of work and disciplines.
He can safely quote the title of the little booklet that he has published “- well, we must be getting on”.
Gertrud Købke Sutton
Art historian
