Julie Nord

Copenhagen

In his works Danish artist, Julie Nord, jeopardizes the Portrait that is traditionally associated with something truthful, ie. a realistic depiction of the portrayed. The portraits of Julie Nord do not meet our expectations of what we understand by a portrait or childhood. She is all through ambivalent and avoids with artistic consequence the unilateral. Instead she puts the viewer in a questioning position to dogmas and firmly cemented perceptions of reality.

Nord combines familiar and cliché-like imagery of childhood, homeliness and family in new ways – either by unexpected juxtapositions or by breaking up the surface of the picture in various ways – so they loose their original meaning. Particularly our view on the child has virtually stayed unchanged since the Romantic Movement, where concepts such as the innocence of childhood and the natural child came into being with the French philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau. When Julie Nord to a larger extent focuses on “childhood” as a social construction, cracks occur between the idea of the child and the child itself (the individual).

The faces in the portraits disappear and emerge – in a constant change. In contrast the wallpaper in the background and the patterns in the clothes appear sharp and clear in their meticulous execution. In some works the wallpaper ornaments blend in with the faces. In other works the faces are just a blank void.

Julie Nord

V1

February 23 – March 27, 2013
Flæsketorvet 69 – 71
1711 Copenhagen V
Denmark

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