Danish artist
Born in Copenhagen 1968
Lives and works in Copenhagen

Kaspar, Bonnén is one of those young artists who in an art world focused on video and interdisciplinary work felt a renewed attraction to painting, exploring its techniques and potentials.

At the other hand Kaspar Bonnén also works in other media than painting. He is interested in the various spaces that host human activity; these are both physical and social.

An installation he built at the Alberslund City Hall in 1999 illustrates this very well: Inside the building he constructed this own small “house”, thus commenting on the interaction and contrast between the private and the public domain.

In his paintings and in the lithographs he produced for the Muka Print Project he starts from images of familiar objects and interiors from his own private environment, a kitchen sink, a chair, a table, a bedroom, but then he contrasts them with seemingly random irrugular, organic shapes and patches of strong contrasting color. People, animals and plants are absent from this world, it is as if they never existed and this constitutes a first level of abstraction, then
Kaspar Bonnén obliterates the familiar shapes by throwing an unrelated abstract expressionist painting over them.

It is important to see the works not as a composite thing but as an entirely new reality created by the artist similar or paralel to the virtual reality one can create with a computer combining familiar, recognizable shapes with manipulated or simulated ones all in the same flat space of the screen.

It feels as if the familiarity of the everyday shapes is actually a lure to pull our mind into the imaginary world of the artist.