Q&A with Martin Aagaard Hansen
1: Can you tell me about your background?
I was born in Odense in 1988, happy childhood, worked odd jobs trying to keep student counselors of my back.
started making paintings at 17 in the cellar of my old apartment.
then i was accepted at the royal danish academy of art.
That’s pretty much it, I think.
2: What is the process and Material in your work ?
The process is basically from painting to painting. Sometimes they feel like football players constantly being taken on and off the bench. Some need to dry up, so they are put aside for another one, you know? It’s very fluid actually.
The materials I work with at the moment are watercolor, ink and gouache on thin ,raw cotton fabric.
3: What is the Idea / concept behind your art?
Hmm, it shifts a lot. But I guess at the time I try to work a lot with stuff that I know pleases me visually and to challenge these tendencies and preferences I have. For example; painting a perfectly shaped square in the middle of the canvas. Then I remove the canvas from the stretcher, and when I put it back together I have stretched the canvas to the point that the square has lost its shape. Also because the canvas shrinks when I apply watercolors.
I find it interesting to try and force a certain strictness into a material that cannot really handle this ambition.
My ideas at the moment is, trying to stray away from a typical kind of compositorial painting, and to treat the painting much more as a surface where something has happened.
Visible or not i see view them as used pieces of fabric, or something that were once a part of something else.
i am constantly shifting between pure intuitive abstractions found in the process of painting, to concrete inspirational sources either from memory or stuff I notice in my surroundings. Like textures of walls, weird bus-seat designs, etc.
idea, concept, pushing stuff forward.. its all the same to me really..
4: What is the Worst thing about being an artist?
Ah! That is definitely looking for stuff. I don’t keep a particularly tidy studio, so half of my time spent there is spent on looking for things that I’ve misplaced.
Also moving large paintings around. For some reason I always feel like an idiot while doing that.
5: Collectors – Gallerist – ”art investors” – Good, bad or …?
Some good, some bad, as in any context I guess.
6: What would you ask an artist in a Q&A ?
What do you do beside making art? I find that interesting when you know people in the art world their work kind of becomes their persona, so when you get to know them on a personal level it’s a fucking relieve that they enjoy playing squash or collecting magic cards.
