Artists

Cecilie Norgaard

Press release

In densely layered, colorful canvases, Cecilie Norgaard’s conceptual oil paintings jokingly tease out the hierarchical highs and lows produced by contemporary society. If oil painting was once a cornerstone in glorifying the upper class, Norgaard insists on flipping this narrative. 

In her new painting series created for O—Overgaden, she focuses on mundane, everyday objects. Motifs including cars, piggy banks, clocks, and trucks clash, crash, repeat, or multiply turning into their own abstraction in an absurdist theater of money, (visual) aesthetics, and acceleration.

Collectively creating a circular typography or alphabet, Norgaard’s motifs extend to include workers, city architecture, letters, colored pencils (looking a lot like the workers), and schematic indexes. Each individual piece is part of a wider ensemble of recirculated figures, forming a progression from one painting melting into another. Centrally placed in somber, stage-lit scenes, suspended from context, with a standard, old-fashioned, renaissance-like landscape in the background, the motifs jointly repeat as an inventory of working-class infrastructure turned primary aesthetic object. In one painting, haulage trucks and shipping containers—key to European trade mobility—are rendered as monochrome rectangles, in turn transforming these aesthetically outcast shipping surfaces into something akin to early modernist block-colored abstractions.

These canvases are in critical dialogue with, if not directly revolting against, painting’s majestic history. Commenting on its own origin as painting, one piece shows a paint-by-numbers diagram overlaying a car-carrying trailer crashing across a highway sending multicolored cars flying, like flashes of color samples. Through repainting and repetition, the particular painterly figure can transform into a new symbolic signifier: when the colored cars crash, they become blurry, color-saturated abstractions, or, as seen in another painting, the clockface turns into a painter’s palette.

In spite of this playful prompt to create new meaning—new semantics—there is something unsettling about Norgaard’s inescapable and circular universe. When the piggy bank is broken, it simply reveals another broken piggy bank, as if forming a continuously crashing, dark dream of everyday economics.

Cecilie Norgaard (b. 1991, DK) is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2021) and lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. She has previously exhibited at venues including Rinde am Rhein, Düsseldorf (2024); Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin (2024); Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen (2024); galeriepcp, Paris (2023); Den Frie, Copenhagen (2022); and mumok, Vienna (2022). The exhibition at O—Overgaden is Norgaard’s first institutional solo show.