Kirstine Reiner Hansen, well known for her depictions of figures in turbulent, glamour-tinged environments, has moved towards a new subject. Her recent landscapes are meditations on environmental themes that extend the artist’s collage-like explorations of perception without relying on human narratives and situations. It feels, in some sense, that the figures and architectural vistas that had been appearing in her paintings were stage sets that have now fallen away, and their absence invites the tensions and possibilities that animate the new work.
These new landscape paintings flirt with abstraction while remaining real enough to offer the possibility that a certain place might be recognized, but only fitfully. Reiner Hansen, who has an affinity for visual paradox, disrupts her vistas by offering glimpses of scenic beauty interwoven with unexpected glitches and lacunae. Her color choices, which range from drab to lurid, intentionally complicate their contradictory emanations. As Reiner Hansen seems to understand, this is not the right moment in time to paint landscapes that rely on wholeness and harmony. Photographs and computer screensavers can cover that territory. Instead, she paints a kind of fragile, tainted beauty that tells us how she feels about the situation of nature at this precarious moment in time.
- John Seed