Power Play

Mie Olise Kjærgaard lets us enter utopian realms in non-utopian times.

BY EVE HILL-AGNUS

Let us begin with an island. It is the remote island of Mors, where the Danish artist Mie Olise Kj æ rgaard grew up, encircled by an equally remote northwestern strip of land, where fishermen are weathered and the accent thick. Later, she would live in Copenhagen, London, the US, and now Copenhagen again. But the island is the logical departure point for a much-traveled artist. It is perhaps the perfect origin setting for someone who creates worlds.

First, her larger-than-human-scale paintings teemed with architectural structures—the emptiness of vacant constructions and vagabond amusement parks—that reflected her six years studying architecture. Then series like the one depicting a fictional Moirania caught non-gendered figures “doing basic things,” Kjærgaard says: rowing, bicycling, laundering, but in a world that allowed her to explore utopias—of social structures as much as climate.

Now her women take the fore in two shows opening simultaneously in Dallas, at the Karpidas Collection and the gallery Various Small Fires.

Kjærgaard deals in imagination and fantasy, creating femalecentric paradigms in a non-utopian time. Showing movement is her forte—clear and striking. What is the role of whimsy? Of fantasy? Of imagination? And who makes the rules?

Her paintings often depict girls sitting astride a rhinoceros, or dragon, or shark, or fierce feline (lion or leopard), their hair flowing out in a thatch of sheer velocity. They bristle with unapologetic energy. With loose, wide, confident brushstrokes and a smattering of drips, Kjærgaard corrals the girls’ pluck, rendering it tangible. Like her subjects, who break free from even the smallest notions of stricture, her compositions teeter or push out of the frame. In their gestural energy, they become pert, pithy statements—baubles of jubilation.

The world of props is likewise topsy-turvy. Are all guitars actually tennis rackets? Yes, flipped upside-down, they’ve become musical sans skipping a beat. Via these hybrid objects, we are both tethered and push off from the shores of reality.

Immersed in these realms, the rules are not the same. Kjærgaard uses white beautifully to carve out space or delineate form in the way some artists use black. “There has to be some blunt, brave strokes for me to like the work,” she says. She’s interested in striding along the canvas as she paints and using her whole arm; interested in the British suffragettes: “They would throw off their corsets and play tennis.”

She remembers the exhilarating, liberating feeling of bicycling as a young girl without using her hands, the wind in her hair. And then puberty and the about-face, the feeling that she became “somebody that people can have an opinion about: a woman,” a denouement devoutly unwished. A betrayal. A disappointment and resulting sense of unease—“And how do I break out of that”— toward empowerment and independence? She reclaims that gaze—propping herself up on Laura Mulvey’s 1975 film theory of the male gaze.

“I like layers of my paintings to be detached from everyday life,” Kjærgaard says, so the journey is also a “mental journey,” a feminist angle with layers of humor and self-irony. Or seen another way: “When you’re standing on a crocodile, playing a guitar ... it’s a little bit of a power trip.”

In the first room of the Karpidas Collection exhibition, Holding Space comprises nine paintings commissioned by Pauline Karpidas. The women of Holding Space, or what Kjærgaard dubs her “sitting power boss-like women,” embody the power trip, with their yellowand-black pinstripe suits (or are they pajamas?) and their defiant gazes. They are holding space and looking back at you as they lounge in their low-slung chairs.

In the Various Small Fires exhibition, To Infinity and Beyond, smaller-format paintings in the more diminutive space belong to Kjærgaard’s category of subjects absorbed in their own reality, unconcerned by the gaze, atoms in movement, agents in their own universe. A third segment is adjacent to the Karpidas Collection’s Holding Space. Here, works from the collection curated in tandem with Sara Hignite, curatorial consultant for the collection, will extend the themes of perspective, upending mores, and transcending the gendered gaze.

“It’s so of-the-moment in that here are these feminist pictures, but they’re celebratory,” says Michael Nevin, co-owner of The Journal

Gallery in New York, which gave Kjæ rgaard a solo exhibition in late 2021. “I think she should be known as this force in contemporary Danish painting. To me,” he says, “Mie Olise is sort of teed up to be the known painter of Denmark.”

You find you would like to be one of the twiggy-haired, emancipated women of Kjæ rgaard’s paintings. We all would benefit from a romp in that wide-open world. The figures often wear sashes like bandoliers, but they are not hostile. And perhaps, as Kjærgaard says, in her works, maybe we move “beyond the female gaze or the male gaze. There are several gazes, as we acknowledge a more fluid perspective.” Another thing from which to free ourselves.

Freedom flaunts its broad borders. “I prefer to work in the fantasy world rather than the real world. For me that is a space where everything can happen,” Kjærgaard says. And the medium of paint (in contradistinction to photography or film or architecture) allows for this. “ You don’t have to consider gravity or truth: you make everything up anyway.”

You have a sense of the woman and artist and ardent dreamer on a journey. You do not intend to be taken hostage by her paintings and yet you are—a convert to this utopian world. But it’s hostagetaking of the most delicious, delightful sort. One critic has written that Kjærgaard is akin to a court jester, who tells the serious truth with levity (and in the midst of a changing world). That is one way of looking at it.

What force of augury or divination could have told us Kjærgaard would alight here, in two simultaneous ways, a parallax of visions? Taken together, they are a vindication of strong women and girls, who play and pose, participate, and hold power. P