Summary

Michael Kvium is a Danish artist best known for his illustrations and paintings of distorted creatures rendered in a realistic way. Kvium’s works are obliquely meant to comment on the ugliness of humanity and himself. “When you are working existentially, as I do, it's very important, all the while, to try to include the whole person, and the whole person is, of course, also the feeling of being human, from when one is very young until old age,” he remarked. “The feeling of being vulnerable, the feeling of frailness. But here, I'm working much more abstractly seeing that ordinarily, people react very violently.” Many of his works depict figures that resemble the artist, but are somehow contorted or discolored. Born on November 15, 1955 in Horsens, Denmark, the artist studied under Albert Mertz and Stig Brøgger at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He would go on to create Værkstedet Værst, a collaborative workshop for performance art, alongside artist Christian Lemmerz. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, Denmark, the Red Brick Contemporary Art Museum in Beijing, China, and the Cabinet Des Estampes in Geneva, Switzerland, among others. Kvium lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.