Lone Haugaard Madsen: Raum#428—Fumus

Bild 1–5: Photo: Simon Vogel
Bild 6: Courtesy Nagel Draxler Kabinett

Lone Haugaard Madsen (born in 1974 in Silkeborg, Denmark) is one of the most relevant female artists of her generation in Scandinavia and beyond. Departing from her studies in humanistic theory of science at Aarhus University and at the Jutland Art Academy in the 1990s, she joined art school at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in the early 2000s with a deep skepticism regarding the question of what art can be today, and oriented towards radical institutional critique in the vein of Michael Asher or Gordon Matta-Clark. In her work, which encompasses sculpture, performance, painting and installation, she has been exploring the format she refers to as ‘spaces’ – constellations of found objects and paintings that have been ‘rubbed’ onto found canvases. Skepticism can never be eradicated from the mind of a true artist. Haugaard Madsen is not an artist who is guided by ideas, but rather by a thought process rooted in experience. Gradually, her work is shifting away from the use of various materials in space toward capturing and concentrating the aesthetic presence of these materials and spaces on the canvas using raw painterly techniques. The result is a series of profoundly deep and beautiful paintings—works of art capable of keeping pace with the doubts surrounding contemporary art in a world where contemporary thinking is in decline.