New Danish Art 07 – Christina Hamre

When the Organization of Leaders for the first time, last year, wanted to honor a talented innovative young Danish artists they chose Christina Hamre, who was presented with the award of 50.000 kr. as The Young Artist of the year 2006 at Statens Museum for Kunst 6th September 2006. The artistic scope of Christina Hamre is large. Through many genres and different media she explores sides of life, which seems to relate to two sides of human stratum; our psychic sub consciousness and our physical experience. This points to an artistic practice that is inspired by the fight character of performance art, which explores the bodily consciousness, whilst the mental unconscious dimension is often expressed in her drawings and sculptures. The single works often interact in a dialectic relationship wherein a fantastic, fabulist and fascinating pictorial universe unfolds – striving to make visible what offhand seems intangible, and at the same time they point into the self and out into the world.

Christina Hamre graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in 2004. Among her graduation pieces on Exit 04 at the exhibition hall Gl. Strand you could find her 205 cm. tall leather figure ‘Mumien’ (The Mummy). With wide-open eyes and the tongue hanging from its broad mouth, the mummy's face had an absurd cartoon-like face. It looked out of this world with its tight greenish skin and deformed limbs and unnaturally long arms. Still, there was a sort of recognition in the figures physical presence as a frozen shape on the floor. The body was decorated with a form of primitive adornment which most of all looked like the mystical signs we know from the cave paintings of the past.

As usual in Hamre’s works, the mummy alludes to and underlines the contrasting peculiarities of life and death. Through the title, death becomes a narrative layer that contains partially unknown episodes, which helps bring the sculpture to life.

In the drawings of Christina Hamre the human stratum unfolds in symbolic tales, which often evolve around questions regarding normality/sickness, powerlessness, dreams and hatred. A large presentation of Hamre’s drawings was on display at Galleri Christoffer Egelund in the spring of 2006. In the exhibition Interaktion, with Marianne Lipschitz Jørgensen, she aimed at challenging and exploring the potential in this media. Formally, it was a union of two very different expressions, but looking at aesthetics, and formalist choices you could still see interplay through their work with lines, systems and patterns, which directed one’s focus towards confrontations, contact and interaction on several levels; within pieces, and between them.

Christina Hamre presented a range of drawings with ant outset in a fantasy world translated into a free pictorial language that particularly took its inspiration Native art and Art Brut, the mental universe of Outsider Art. This was given expression in a symbolism, which dealt with opposites or hybrids, where wandering gypsy-colonies and dead monsters met in unknown dream-like travel-landscapes.

Among other things there was a gigantic, melting, pink woman in the drawing Mastodont (2006), which seemed to visualize or personify the feeling of not fitting in; to feel you are too mush, or to take up too mush space. Furthermore, using very simple means, Hamre suggested a woman feeling uncomfortable, a woman who cant’t say properly and can’t express herself, as she had created her without a mouth. And on her shoulders was a skeletal fantasy monster, a bad conscious or a threatening consciousness of something evil. In Hamre’s drawings, as Mastodont, people, fables and animals meet as visual metaphors of people’s inner nature. They are opposites who require each other’s existence.

The mental landscapes that Hamre creates seem to be played out between the poles between scary and sweet, ugly and beautiful, which also reflects an artistic practice which springs from an underlying formal artistic exploration wherein simple formal elements are convincingly paired with complex ornaments. There is an overall aesthetical purity or ease in the works of Hamre, which give the onlooker a chance to get involved with the fantasy universe on a deeper level. Each piece seems to be the result of many aesthetic as well as mental considerations and reflections that play out in narrative structural layers which are basically about the lives of beings – on all its levels. In all, a pictorial world of romantic elements that arise from fantasy and come from both absurd and common human interaction is created.

Marie Kirkegaard
Ny Dansk Kunst 07. Ed.: Marie Kirkegaard, Torben Zenth and Anne Kathrine Eriksen. Kopenhagen Publishing & Shooting Gallery Press, Copenhagen 2007