Jonna Pedersen, Denmark's Page

Website

http://www.jonnapedersen.dk

Relationship status

in a relationship

College / University

Danish Art School: Bjørn Ignatius Øckenholts Frederikbergske Billedkunstskole

Program

Painting, collages, drawing

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Drawing, Painting

I am...

a Danish artist who has been working with urban landscapes since I went to New York in 2006...at the moment I am fooling around with still life paintings...

About my artwork

The first picture Jonna Pedersen ever painted was a copy of a work by the Danish Cobra artist Asger Jorn that she fell in love with in the Silkeborg Museum. For a while, earlier in her career, she worked in a similarly frenzied gestural manner, before becoming enamored of the bland facades of shops on streets devoid of people, yet somehow seemingly haunted by their absence.

The urban environment that Pedersen evokes suggests the aftermath of one of those 'smart bombs' that can supposedly wipe out an entire population without destroying property­­a Godsend, some might say, given the relative value of real estate over human life in today's world. Sans signs of life, everything appears pristinely undisturbed in Pedersen's paintings. But while Denmark is technically a welfare state, remnants of rampant consumerism are everywhere evident in the variety of signs plastering the storefronts.

Not knowing Danish makes them all the more intriguing, even though Pedersen supplies English titles. In 'Tanning Salon,' under the shopfront that says 'Consol Solcenter,' a poster in the window shows a tiny figure in a swimsuit exulting with upraised arms on a beach. Since the human presence is so rare in Pedersen's paintings, this minuscule detail seems almost spooky, a remnant of vanished natural joy embalmed in an urban mausoleum as alien as one of Yves Tanguy's surrealist boneyards.

The desolate effect is enhanced by Pedersen's meticulously detailed style, in which acrylics are employed like tempera paints to produce flat, dry-looking color areas that can appear simultaneously bright and muted. She paints every brick in an obsessive manner reminiscent of Ben Shahn's early social realist cityscapes; yet her jazzy use of commercial signage and abruptly cropped word fragments as abstract shapes recalls Stuart Davis.

Indeed, Pedersen's paintings function dynamically as geometric hard-edge abstractions, as seen in 'Nord Flex,' a picture of a window and door store in which the rectangles of the windows depicted on the signs rhyme visually with the actual windows in the building facade above the shopfront. The compositional tension is further heightened by the white traffic lines in the gray gutter, which contradict the two dimensional picture plane with implied perspective.

Yet to put too much emphasis on the formal attributes in the paintings of Jonna Pedersen would be to short-change their universal symbolic resonance. Not many artists, after all, can present one with a bland stucco structure called 'Gastronomia Italiana,' in what appears to be Danish strip-mall, and make something about its deadpan eeriness evoke the night the notorious renegade Mafioso Crazy Joey Gallo went into a place called Umberto's Clam House, in New York's Little Italy, and ended up face-down in his calamari.

Ed McCormack
Gallery&Studio
New York City

Artists I like

Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Stuart Davis, Maria Wandel, Bjørn Eriksen, Lars Svanholm, Edward Hopper...

Interests

urban landscapes, people, relationships, design,

Centre of the artworld:

New York, nowhere and everywhere