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artreview.com 20 November 2008

Jonna Pedersen, Copenhagen, Denmark's Page

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Profile

Website
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,
The centre of the artworld is
New York, nowhere and everywhere

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Jonna Pedersen, Copenhagen, Denmark's Artworks

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At 5:29am on 4th November 2008, Mark Bennion said…
Nice work...

M
At 9:32pm on 24th September 2008, Mads Ljungdahl said…
Hej Jonna - prøvede lige at sende en besked til dig men den gik vist ikke igennem. Hvis du lige sender mig et bip på madsljungdahl@gmail.com så sender jeg et link til "Renegade" på fredag.
Bedst,
M
At 2:05pm on 19th September 2008, Rob Lloyd said…
Yes do come and visit the UK before we go down the financial drain! Credit crunch for greedy (b)...ankers...
My work on this site isn't that brilliantly reproduced due to my having to use a few different mediums to transfer the images but I hope anyone interested will realise the ideas etc behind the basic images I'm interested in exploring.
I really like work that's organic to the look and sensation and not that interested producing clean edged design - more muddy the better!
But do come here to Uk and challenge the BritArt clique who like to believe their own anti-establishment hype aka D.Hurst megabuckboyfromYorkshire.
Rob
At 8:11pm on 12th September 2008, Michaelchang said…
Det var bare smør på brødet og pigment i bøtterne. Men tak. Har du set gruppen Exquisite Dialogues? Det vil være fedt at have dig med.
At 3:27pm on 12th September 2008, shiralee saul said…
You're very welcome Jonna. I really have enjoyed being introduced to your work -- it's simultaneously engaging and alienating -- my favorite combination. I do think that one of the things that those in the artworld are very poor at is giving each other feedback. You can see it in this community where so many fine works have only been looked at by 1 or 2 people.
At 6:01pm on 11th September 2008, Michaelchang said…
du kan se illuserne her: ....,|._cph–_-
At 10:28pm on 10th September 2008, Michaelchang said…
Hej Jonna, jeg lavede engang en masse illustrationer til kbh.s lufthavns blad airport. Jeg er vild med dine malerier, det ser da for godt ud det du har gang i.
At 10:12pm on 10th September 2008, Mads Ljungdahl said…
26 sept. er der en visning af Fotografi i et projekt der hedder "Renegade" på Frederiksberg. Jeg skal prøve at huske at sende en invitation til dig.
M
At 9:37pm on 10th September 2008, Mads Ljungdahl said…
...jeg er også ret vild med New York, overraskende intim og nærværende, dens størrelse taget i betragtning. Jeg har dog kun været der et par gange. Tilbage i midten af firserne på studietur med kunstakademiet og i 2006 i forbindelse med en udstilling. Stor oplevelse begge gange. Meget forskellig fra alle andre Amerikanske byer jeg har været i. Kan godt forstå at den opfattes europæisk, af mange i USA; en by hvor man går meget. Glæder mig til næste besøg.
Bedst,
Mads
At 4:47pm on 10th September 2008, Mads Ljungdahl said…
Tak for din kommentar Jonna - er faktisk ret vild med en del af dine bygninger og bygningsdele, komplet med en masse fine sten og graffiti, så det føles ret godt.
Billedet du kommenterede er iøvrigt fra New York, hvor jeg kan forstå at du bor i øjeblikket.!? Bli'r du..?
Mads
 
 

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