Fugleburet
Formation Gallery
16 Aug 2024 – 28 Sep 2024
To be able to look oneself in the eye and stand by who you truly are has become a theme for the Danish artist Fugleburet that has occupied more of his thoughts than most. Now, the artist, whose real name is Henrik Steen, takes himself at his word and implements the mirror as a medium in his works, so that both he and his audience can look themselves directly in the eye.
Fugleburet is known for his distinctive aesthetic language, always balancing figuration and abstraction in a spontaneous play with colors, form, and recognizable nods to the great masters of art history. With "Radiance," the artist tackles a new medium—the mirror.
It has long been an open secret that the man behind the artist name "Fugleburet" not only excelled as a visual artist but, parallel to his work on the canvas, is also one of Denmark's most sought-after makeup artists for film. These two separate careers have run in tandem but have not previously visibly overlapped, which is why the artist has kept his identity hidden under the alias "Fugleburet." Now, the artist sends an honest and open nod to his identity as a makeup artist by incorporating the mirror, with which he has worked in front of and alongside throughout his career.
The mirror is your closest friend and ally in shaping and refining skin, hair, and human characteristics, so both the villain, the hero, and the beauty emerge. So it was somehow written in the cards that Fugleburet would explore the mirror in his artistic work for this exhibition.
For the artist, the reflective nature of the mirror offers many possibilities to involve the space and the viewer in the work. Looking at the work, you see yourself, the space, and the motif in one glance. This doubling of the work’s perspective gives the artist a presence and openness that is new and fresh. The motifs are therefore not as dense and multifaceted as usually seen with Fugleburet—the openness, the softer, more whimsical visual language, and the monochrome color choices give a new lightness to the works, leaving room to experience and sense the many possibilities of the mirror. Along with the mirror works, the artist has supplemented with a series of raw canvas pieces, which create a tactile and visually well-placed contrast with their matte, rough linen surface.
However, it wouldn’t be a true Fugleburet exhibition experience if the playful, chaotic, and mischievous didn’t have a place, so the artist has thrown himself into a larger wall painting. Fugleburet has previously been behind a large mural on Amager and recently explored the possibilities of wall painting in connection with a gallery exhibition in Jutland. So it came quite naturally that there would also be work done directly on the wall in the exhibition space.
With "Stråleglans" Fugleburet stands by who he is with all his multifaceted talents. The exhibition is intended as an artistic free space where the artist shows new sides of his practice, and where we as viewers are also set free to sense and experience not just the art, but also ourselves. The free bird, which has always been present as a motif in Fugleburet’s universe, is not only a nod to one of his great idols Asger Jorn but also an insistent desire to be and live as freely as the bird. "Radiance" is precisely an ode to this desire for freedom and to levitate slightly above the predictability of everyday life.
Fugleburet (b.1977) is a self-taught Danish artist. His works fuse inspiration from, for example, Lundstrøm and the COBRA movement, blending it with his own characteristic figures, such as the bird’s beak. The artist unfolds his colorful, sharply defined, and playful universe in a tightly controlled style that is unmistakably his own.
