Page 26 - Art at VIPERGEN Korr

Kristian Devantier: Svømmer Helt, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 50.5 x 70.5 cm
Kristian Devantier works with painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture in a naïve and cartoon- inspired style. In the works of Kristian Devantier, man and his interaction with the world are in focus. Here, the people appear stylized and faceless, but never completely anonymous. Instead, there is a strong sense of humor present, which creates a personality for the figures and evokes possible narratives in the works. The artist builds up his paintings through layers of color and in a simple imagery, which can appear concrete but always playful and free as well. With Kristian Devantier, the titles often help to emphasize the work’s humorous qualities and to point the viewer in the direction of the invented stories that are linked to each individual work. In recent years, Kristian Devantier has particularly worked with classical motifs of art history. Thus, he has created various paraphrases of some of art history’s best-known and most canonized paintings to deconstruct their structures and meanings. By playing with factors such as gender and skin color, Kristian Devantier exposes aspects of people’s understanding of images, which are now set free for reinterpretation.
Kristian Devantier (1971 DK) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2000. He has most recently exhibited his works at the Vendsyssel Art Museum, DK; West Jutland Art Museum, DK; Formation Gallery, DK, and Galleri Lars Borella, DK. He has received the Niels Wessel Bagge’s Art Foundation Honorary Grant, and his works are part of the collections of the National Arts Foundation, the organization Art at Work and the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art. Together with Isabel Berglund, he also creates works under the name Isabel Berglund and Kristian Devantier.
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