Kirstine Reiner Hansen’s paintings unravel the realist form, sitting at a crossroads between the real and surreal. It’s this ambiguity that invites the viewer to question the meaning behind them.
“I think art should be ambiguous enough to allow for different interpretations,” remarked the painter in an interview with Jung Katz. “What I hope for, is for people to create their own narratives… that they hopefully look at the work for more than a glance.”
But it took Reiner Hansen some time to find her unique artistic voice. Born in Odense, Denmark, and currently based in Berlin, Reiner Hansen received a BA in Design and Illustration at Kolding School of Design, after which she spent more than 10 years of painting strictly realist paintings.
“I started painting this way out of a need to learn the basics of painting so that I could one day work in a looser style,” she relayed. “So it became a means to an end so to speak and a challenge to see if I could master the techniques of the old masters.”
But as time passed, she found it harder to suppress the nagging voice in her head that asked for change. It all culminated when she moved to New York, where she felt that all those conditions she had put on herself became impossible. “It just seemed to become the right time to break out of the self-imposed mold and start experimenting to make those changes I needed to feel more authentic in what I was doing,” she admits.
She describes her new-found voice as “realism tumbles with cubism,” a more experimental style that makes room for discovery and play. Appropriating imagery from magazines and advertising as a visual reference, she conjoins these images with art historical elements, from renaissance paintings to modernists in collage-like paintings. The result is thought-provoking, to say the least. See for yourself.
