Overview
"My paintings are a becoming or an unfolding, sometimes even a failing, rather than an endpoint. They are changing in time, space, and experience, like our identities and experience of self."

My paintings are a form of time travel in a sense. The painting's surface is a membrane between the inner and outer world. As an anchor in both time and space, there is no need for an observer or an audience. The idea of self disappears as the work becomes a sensory experience, blurring the boundaries of time, space, experience, and memory. Painting is sometimes considered a reflection of identity: to me, it is not so. I instead imagine the act of painting as a proposal for how identity comes to be. My paintings are becoming or unfolding, sometimes even a failing, rather than an endpoint. They are changing in time, space, and experience, like our identities and experience of self. Nothing is ever final. 
 
Thorbjørn Bechmann lives and works in Copenhagen. Bechmann's primary practice is non-representational painting, which explores questions of process and language in abstract painting. Suspicious of the construction of meaning through image-based language, he strives to avoid symbols and pictorial representation, producing artworks that can be experienced bodily and sensorily. His works are process-oriented and are layered with a multitude of shades, hues, and shadows. Viewing his work is an experience of transparency: it points toward the luminous quality of both the painting and the world.

Bechmann studied at the Royal Danish Academy of the Arts. Besides his work as an artist, he has extensive curatorial practice. He has exhibited in Denmark, Germany, Istanbul, Austria, Belgium, Greece, the US, and Japan. His work is also represented in public and private collections, including the Danish Arts Foundation. One of his most recent exhibitions, "Constant Negotiation" (2019), was awarded a prize by the Danish Arts Foundation for its radical investigation of gesture-based painting. 

 

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