Glorious Rejects, 2019

Rejection and embrace is the monogram of human progression, an often cluttered continuum that bobs and weaves between acceptance and revolt, movement that can overlap, and in the process confuse, eliminate, or hybrid in strange and amusing ways. Constant cycles of rejection act as key frames in a glorious film, maybe a film noir, of human experience.

In her latest body of work ‘Glorious Rejects’, Kirstine Reiner Hansen continues to draw on the strategies and manipulations of fashion and media, mashed up with art history, exploring identity and connections.

The artist appropriates imagery from magazines and advertising as visual reference, conjoined with art historical elements, from renaissance paintings to the modernists in collage-like paintings. Picasso’s wall paper might serve as a background, a Bouguereau limb is attached to a Vogue model. Somewhere Cary Grant’s tweed sleeve is re-designed with a satin shirt belonging to Freddie Mercury. Narratives whose format appears ambiguous have crept into the latest work, and often involve multiple figures that are distorted and broken, surrounded by turbulence as they seek to retain some solidity... and glamour.

Hansen views splicing and fragmentation as emblematic of our fast paced, digital- media driven, low attention span culture, describing how we have come to experience and manage our distorted relationship to the world. Within the dizzying imagery of the semi abstract figures and portraits, parallels are sometimes drawn between contemporary advertisements and the portrayal of wealth, beauty and status in art history.

The individual fragments are insignificant taken out of context, but experienced collectively they possess a greater meaning. The challenge and thrill is in the reconstruction of completely arbitrary pieces. Can they make sense together despite the odds? Hansen strives to create a brand new, perhaps surprising harmony, an alchemical transformation.