Mette Vangsgaard (B. 1968, Denmark), currently lives and work in Copenhagen. She graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1996, and in 2011 she was awarded the 3-Year Working Grant from The Danish Arts Council.
Mette Vangsgaard is among else represented at KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art, Vejen Museum of Art, and CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art, and Trapholt.
Mette Vangsgaard’s cross-media works have some kind of universality that makes her contribution to art extremely interesting. Her characteristic experimental, eclectic and unpolished style is defined by her paintings, the base of the artist’s graphical world. Mette Vangsgaard explores the painting techniques with an open, widespread mind, whether it is in perspective, narrative collages created from anything from magazine clippings and colourful prints, album covers, wood, plastic, metal, wallpaper and fur, or in her ceramic sculptures or installations.
In Vangsgaard’s universe, the elements combined encompass topics such as evolution, civilisation, coexistence, loneliness, public spaces, modern social thinking, and the turning down of old environments towards new constructions. Thus, Vangsgaard creates spatial scenarios through illogical combinations, capturing the man’s perception of today’s world. The thematic thread in her career is clear: Vangsgaard improvisation and insatiable hunger are key and reflects her will to represent the contemporary man’s experience in a modern and ever changing world, in an ever-expanding universe – from big issues to the intimate, tangible small human life.
Mette Vangsgaard awakens a poetic realism, a humoristic but profound observation of the everyday life and an exploration of man’s existential cohesion with our surroundings. The surfaces of her works are not merely surfaces: elements are added and sections cut away. From a stylistic point of view, two uneven elements are featured: spontaneous inspiration and an orchestrated rhetoric. By blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination, her artwork explores intersitial spaces and the unspoken, in our society, in our existence and in our human contemporary mind.
