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Svend Wiig Hansen's approach to art in many ways coincides with Munch's. Wiig Hansen is an expressionist and, as it were, paints his personality into the pictures. He shows us the inner being. Besides Edvard Munch, Wiig Hansen is related, in artistic terms, to painters such as Goya, Michelangelo and Francis Bacon. Like them, Wiig Hansen works - both formally and in terms of subject-matter - with the extreme, focusing on life's fundamental questions. Wiig Hansen combines the imaginative expressionism of the Cobra Movement with a consistently figurative pictorial language. His motifs always revolve around the human being, in the no-man's-land between life and death, between perdition and salvation. "I am going to Paradise", he said when he painted 18 Self-Portraits in 1989, "but the serpent is still there". 18 Self-Portraits is one of Wiig Hansen's late works, in which he has put behind him much of the sombre, melancholy mood of the earlier works. Yet the portraits of the human face are just as stark and raw as before. A subject which is repeated a number of times often loses some ot its power. Here, the opposite is the case: the 18 powerful self-portraits transfix us in their gaze, enveloping us in a network of moods typical of the self-portrait, in which the artist is turned in upon himself, with all his angst and self-doubt. |
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