Inge Ellegaard: Picture Dominoes

March 22 – August 31 2025

Inge Ellegaard (1953-2010) enjoyed her breakthrough in the 1980s as part of the so called “Unge Vilde” – a Danish artists’ group called The Young and Wild ones, who revived the art of painting with explosive force. With fierce strokes and unrestrained use of pictorial references, she freely combined mythological themes and banal everyday motives in her expressive works of intense colours.

In many ways, Ellegaard was a period-typical and postmodern painter. At the same time, she was a loner who created her very own style. Her artistic creations for a large part were driven by clashes and contradictions between wild and systematic, between humour and seriousness, abstract and figurative.

Several motives float around in her works, like loose signs with no stable connection with the background. Bees swarm over flowers, the flowers placing themselves over checkers, the checkers invaded by vacuum cleaners … The paintings resemble a kind of picture dominoes in which the elements wander between a variety of series while being combinable back and forth in a sort of never-ending game of meaning-making.