Website

http://www.eriksen.be

Relationship status

in a relationship

College / University

Danish School of Design

Program

Graphic and Drawing

Member type

Artist

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

Drawing, Painting

I am...

Very sensitive and caring...
Don't like to wash up, own a machine to do that :)

About my artwork

'For Bjørn Eriksen it is the human figure. Although his earlier work was apparently influenced by the Scandinavian neo-primitivists of the Cobra group and the German neo-expressionists, his present paintings seem more akin to early Alex Katz, when there were still faint traces of New York School 'process' in Katz's figurative style. But being a postmodernist, Eriksen's hints of the hand may be more beholden to the so-called 'Bad Painting' movement of the 1970s, in which deliberately crude paint handling was combined with narrative intimations for ironic effect.
The double irony, though, is that even when he aims for bad, Eriksen is a very good, which comes across particularly well in his portraits, such as 'Laila,' depicting a woman with a red rose in her hair whose somewhat frumpy Mona Lisa demeanor he manages to endow with a winsomeness akin to Elizabeth Peyton's wispy rock and roll androgeynes. Capable of aping the clumsiness of folk art by making a tan shadow on Laila's face as harshly palpable as a caramel wafer, he can turn right around and sever the dark curve of her shoulder from the dark background with a sinuous sliver of light that could have been cut with a razor.
Such contrasts between awkwardness and grace animate all of Eriksen's paintings in compelling ways, giving the topless girl with her name tattooed on her pelvis in 'Rita Meter Maid' an archaic formal simplicity akin to Modigliani, as she raises an arm above her head to display a clean-shaven armpit; heightening the nerdiness of the four grinning guys in identical checkered sportcoats posed frontally like a publicity shot for a barbershop quartet, in 'Please Return'; emphasizing the burlesque-comic inanity of the bozo in an ill-fitting suit bending over in a kick-me posture with a blond bimbo who looks like she's posing for a pin-up calendar balanced coolly on his back, in 'Anything Goes.'
Bjørn Eriksen based the latter two paintings on old photographs that he found while visiting New York (perhaps they were discarded by some low-rent theatrical agent like the one played by Woody Allen in 'Broadway Danny Rose,' while divesting his dusty files of former clients). But by virtue of his mastery of the deadpan manner, he manages to make the people in the pictures look perfectly bored, as though striking such outlandish poses is all in a day's work.'


Ed McCormack
Gallery&Studio
New York City

Artists I like

Picasso, Hockney, Matisse, Braque, Gris, Freud, Bacon, Mykines, Ingalvur av Reyni, Jonna Pedersen, Lars Svanholm, Rama King Nash, Jorn, Lis Zwick, Joergen Nash, Munch, Bonnard, Manet, Rembrandt and many others...

Interests

Art, Chess, music, fishing, computers...

The centre of the artworld is

online, nowhere and everywhere