Artist Statement/ Biography

Paintings, drawings, sculptures and animations Machines drill towards the center of the earth and fluorescent tree trunks surrender. The force of nature takes the wheel. The forces control time, space and colours that turn into strange events, dream-like and irrationally opening up to a world beyond the one we know.

The space between being awake and asleep. The kaleidoscopic dislocation of the real world melting together with the virtual world in a flimsy overload of information. Parallel micro cosmoses in which time pockets filled with investigations of life, death, birth and sexuality emerge in a symbiosis. Endless microcosms, simultaneous incidences and situations occur in the quest for an archetypical alphabet. Faces, plant roots and bolt nuts encounter abstract elements that lead us into a parallel reality, a web of thought and an iconography that transcends cultures, ages and universes and even the surface of the painting. The space plays with the concept of ‘scientific imagination’ where the impossible has been made possible.

The paintings present large open worlds that surround and push the spectator around on the canvas. They contain an open composition allowing the spectator to get lost in details and colour combinations. Blazing landscapes and apocalyptic worlds form the setting for a dream-like scenario where the detail recounts the ecstasies and tragedies of human life, - in, with and against nature. Both inside and outside of the painting drawings become deposits. They become part of the process of developing the different aspects of the painting, although they are not sketches but more a type of stream of consciousness or an idea developer. The paintings initialize 3D organic sculptures that are almost emerged in nature, like fossils. The expression sleeps in the sculptures but is awakened in the interaction with the painting or the animation and comes to life in installations. The organic sculpture represents the calm and concentrated three-dimensional expression and often appears in one solid colour.

The animation is the medium through which the expression from the drawings and sculptures awakens and lives on in the retina of the spectator. It becomes automatic drawings morphing in and out of each other allowing the spectator to recognise the sequence and to question the relationship between the figurative and the abstract. The animation often appears in installations combined with other types of media. The relationship between the various types of investigation becomes a way to explore the space in-between a 2D and 3D expression. In the installation the different possibilities are reflected upon and ideas form through experiments with painting in an expanded field.

Ida Kvetny (b. 1980) lives in Copenhagen. She has a BA(hons) in Drawing and Painting 2006 (Edinburgh College of Art) and an MA Fine Art 2007 (Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London). She attended the Norfolk Summer School of Art at Yale University in 2005 (Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship Grant).