With his gritty, unflattering craftsmanship, his unruly mix of stark imagery and vigorous abstract marks, and his equally capricious mix of sarcasm and naivety, Oda Knudsen could have easily fit in among the By Unge Vilde (young savages) who emerged in Denmark in the 1980s, somewhat in tandem with German artists like Werner Büttner or Martin Kippenberger. In fact, born in 1938, she was a generation older than these Danish painters (among them Claus Carstensen, Inge Ellegaard and Berit Heggenhougen-Jensen). While “Credit i flamer(Credit in Flames) was Knudsen’s first posthumous exhibition, which the artist had actively planned with curator Iben Bach Elmstrøm before his death last year at the age of eighty-three. I would be tempted to use the phrase living room styling to describe the pell-mell installation of around thirty paintings, half a dozen sculptures, a few textile works and a multitude of drawings – as well as elements that are more difficult to classify, such as works made with bags recycled from boxed wine containers -except living room suggests a place for some sort of distinguished gathering, and this show was anything but a polite tea party. Instead, it generated an enthusiastic visual clamor in which there was nonetheless plenty of room for pensive reflection and uneasy questioning.
Only some of the works on display could be dated, and these were mostly produced between the 1990s and Knudsen’s death. Presumably some of the undated were much older, but, in the absence of additional information, one could not understand how the artist’s work developed over time. However, the resulting sense of near-simultaneity proved fitting, showing that Knudsen was one of those artists with an enthusiasm to try anything once. I can’t choose typical tracks, only one-of-a-kind favourites. Among these is an untitled and undated piece painted in uniform shades of gray on an unstretched cruciform support assembled from silver plastic wine bags (a sideways glance shows their now useless nozzles colliding on the wall). We first distinguish, in the center, a wide mouth with a rather threatening smile, surmounted by a pair of eyes turned to the left. Only gradually can one discern, in the overall field of floating brush marks, that this comically menacing face belongs to a spiny-backed fish entering the image from above.
Another of Knudsen’s triumphs of brevity is Sovereign Dyrene (The Animals Sleep), 1999 which, despite its title, shows no fauna in its symphony of yellows and blues, just a single man, perhaps naked, pacing, both unbalanced and assertive, through what could be a rocky landscape. The almost total lack of detail makes it difficult to say anything specific about what this painting really means to show, but the sheer visual force conveyed by its brutality of form is undeniable. A related work that reveals a bit more, but still without quite giving away its meaning, is Skibet skal sejle i nat (The Ship Must Sail Tonight), 1997. Here again, the composition is dominated by a bearded male character, and this time there is no doubt that he is naked, his sex proves it. He wades through an aquatic environment with silhouettes of boats in the distance, while a few dark plant shapes rise from the bottom of the canvas like foils. Throughout the show, images of men were more frequent than of women, and often, as here, the man appeared both imposing and vulnerable, at sea, but persevering. In light of how young female painters have worked in recent years to reclaim the female form, Knudsen’s effort to reinterpret the male body becomes all the more impressive for its relative sparseness.
