Peter Bonde New Works

Peter Bonde’s exhibition revolves around the key words: speed, turbulence and uncontrolled. Through his strong sense of composition and colour, he uses the beautiful brush strokes to cross out and create a compositional balance and picturesque beauty.
Photography Morten Kamper Jacobsen

Bonde’s style is raw, unique and spontaneous. He is constantly exploring the boundaries of different painting styles and testing new techniques. His painting is often combined with bold statements and texts, where prominent words and phrases are combined with monochrome surfaces in a humorous and sometimes satirical, interaction between language and painting. His Index series is an ongoing project where Bonde creates references to the knowledge he through literature acquired. He photographs the covers of books from his book collection of about 6,000 books, and combines thus the painting with the literary. The book covers are painted over, leaving the words or phrases mostly uncovered almost like a commentary on our society.

More recently, Bonde has interchanged the traditional canvas for a mirror foil. It has the same effect and feel as a normal mirror. In these works, Peter Bonde challenges the normal associations with mirrors by disturbing the way it reflects. We can see the same reflection as in any mirror, in his work but mostly it is covered, by vibrant and explosive brush strokes. This draws attention to the environment the painting is displayed in, such that we look at parts of the reflection that we often ignore, the floor or the wall behind for example.

Peter Bonde (b. 1958) graduated from The Royal Art Academy of Denmark in 1982, whereafter from 1996 to 2005 was a Professor at “Malerskolen” (The Painter’s School); thereafter representing Denmark at Venedig Biennale in 1999 (with Jason Rhoades). He received the Eckersbergs Medal in 2003 and in 2011 was awarded the National Arts Foundation’s lifelong honour yield. Bonde is represented in many major collections at home and abroad, a few being: ARKEN – Museum for Modern Art in Ishøj, Denmark, PROJE 4L, Can Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul, Esbjerg Museum of Art in Esbjerg, Denmark, Horsens Art Museum in Horsens, Denmark, Trapholt Museum of Art in Kolding, Denmark, The National Gallery of Art in Copenhagen, Denmark, Wolfsburg Museum of Art, Germany and Axa Nordstern in Cologne, Germany.