There is something cartoonish about Cecilie Norgaard’s exhibition at O-Overgaden, her first-ever solo show at an art institution. Not only because of the small animated pencils you will find hopping around several of the paintings, appearing to work on them. The trait is even more apparent in how various figures and motifs jump from one canvas to the next, adding new layers to the very personal and distinctive painterly world created here. You could say that meaning arises in the gaps – or, staying within the realm of comics, in the gutters separating the frames.
Norgaard graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2021 and as yet has just one previous solo exhibition in Copenhagen – presented at Matteo Cantarella – to her name. This is to say that for many Danes, Emotionally Invested will be their very first encounter with Norgaard. It is quite a well-orchestrated one.
The exhibition opens with two oil paintings that, in some aspects, could hardly be more different. They outline the extremes of Norgaard’s practice, yet at the same time have a clear kinship in terms of theme and subject matter. One, Immergrün (Evergreen, all works 2025), employs a classic perspective to create an illusion of depth, showing a relatively generic landscape in dark, smouldering, and saturated colours. In the foreground, an auto transporter crashes, its trailer filled with cars flying in all directions and landing on the asphalt like splashes of paint in varying degrees of dissolution. The other, Small Medium Large, emphasises the picture plane, creating a sense of flatness. Here we see six transporters with coloured, square containers stacked on top of each other. Letters descend across the flat image, forming a rebus that might spell out the artwork’s title if arranged in the right order.
It is something of a cliché to say that a painting is a container for meaning. Yet that very issue seems to be in play in Norgaard’s two paintings – and, thankfully, they push the investigation of the theme far enough to make things interesting. There is fundamental fun to be had in imagining how the canvases on display might have been shipped and driven around in the same kinds of containers they represent, or how a blob of paint can become a car on the canvas, and how that same car might crash and dissolve back into splashes of paint. How things can be laden with concrete and abstract content – and sometimes, as in the case of the container holding a painting of a container inside itself, both at the same time – tickles the fancy. Yet there is a fine semiotic point in the fact that the smallest element of the image, the element comparable to a letter within the realm of linguistics, is a fluid entity: it can be a splash or a coloured box that can be combined with other elements to form meaning – a process akin to forming words out of letters.
From here, you can move in one of two directions, clockwise or counter-clockwise, through the relatively small exhibition comprising eleven works. Approaching it from the left, you are greeted by a work that very aptly features a clock face; from the right, you find a piece depicting a painter’s palette. In terms of composition and colour scheme, the two works mirror each other.
The one with the clock face bears the pertinent title Zeitgenössische Arbeit (Contemporary Work). In it, we find six small animated pencils busily pushing the clock hands forward. Some have firm contours, while others are more transparent. Their colours appear to diffuse outward from their bodies like an aura, seemingly creating the image as we watch. What we have here, then, is yet another painting about painting, but one that appears to leave a door open to a conversation about artistic labour, time shortage, economics, and circulation.
I understand the exhibition title, Emotionally Invested, in rather the same spirit. On the one hand, it suggests a clash between aspects relating to investment, economy, and logistics. On the other hand, it hints at something softer and more difficult to quantify – something poised between a concrete discussion about how art is, essentially, a form of work, of labour, and a more imaginative exploration of what that work entails.
Further into the circular
exhibition, we find several pieces featuring piggy banks. Some are presented as
an accumulation of identical objects and others as a container for yet another
piggy bank. The latter brought a wry smile of recognition to my face. As a writer,
I too, know the feeling of breaking open my piggy bank merely to find that it contains
another promise that perhaps, somewhere inside, a functioning economy exists. I
recognise in these works the circular economy that appears to be an endless
loop, and perhaps also the more abstract sensation that one piece of work leads
to the next, just as one motif in Norgaard’s paintings seems to pave the way
for a new one.
Overall, there is something fluid
and somewhat elusive about Cecilie Norgaard’s entire universe. Splashes of
paint can become cars, which can turn back into paint splashes, which in turn
can function as letters of sorts that can form words. A palette can become a
clock face, which can become a painting, which can show us how time shapes the
labour that in turn shapes the artwork. We also find a painting featuring a
connect-the-dots drawing of the subject, as if inviting us to complete the
image ourselves. In another work, a group of cartoonish coloured pencils frame
an almost abstract painting comprising many layers that extend into the
background. Everything is dissolving, becoming, and transforming all at once.
Painting about painting can sometimes be a rather dull affair, but that is not the case with Norgaard. Perhaps it is the almost performative installation, which reflects the often slightly stiff and contextless scenes, that makes it all so effective? Or the slightly absurd circular motion that binds form and content together in a knot so loose that it seems on the verge of coming apart? Might the impact reside in the works’ ability to reference each other, doubling and reinforcing each other’s points and potentials? Or is it in the exhibition’s very clear-cut logic, which is more sensitive and painterly than linguistic or narrative?
There is a lot to take in and unpack here, between containers and vessels, coloured pencils and paint splashes, accelerations and traffic accidents. You are never quite done with this exhibition; it keeps hold of you in all its fluid circularity.
