Ane Vester is working with painting on the basis of a conceptual and expanded approach, where what defines the works as paintings is continuously subject to negotiation. She is combining color surfaces withwords, working site-specifically with respect to the space and the light, and calling into play materials like wood, glass, Plexiglas and aluminum. There’s a sense of curiosity in these experiments, which plays a role in opening up for fundamental painterly questions regarding place, language and memory. Ane Vester’s early works from the 1990s was based on a sculptural and installation-related interest. Since that time, she has been changing her focus towards painting in the broadest sense. However, she has consistently held on tightly to a sensibility about the work’s existence within the space and its relation to the body, where it can be experienced, by turns, as picture, as object and as sign.

 

A pervasive feature of Ane Vester’s art works is their distance from expressive marks. Generally speaking, they are in possession of a relatively cool, anonymous, or objective appearance. As far as it is possible to do so, she avoids letting the individual brushstrokes be distinctly clear, with the result that one’s attention remains fixed on the surface and on the work’s presence in the now. This manner of rendering the painting process –or the painterly gesture –anonymous anoints her works with a considerable degree of directness, while simultaneously placing Ane Vester herself, as artist-subject, in parentheses. The painting is thereby allowed to make its appearance as thing or as color emanation rather than as representation or working process.

 

The works’ objective appearance is situated in continuation of a long tradition within abstract art that extends back to the 1960s, where the choice of geometric structures operated as a way of circumventing notions concerning intuitive composition and concerning the art work as an expression of the artist’s inner life.In Ane Vester’s work, however, abstraction is not merely a tradition that is being confirmed but is just as much a dimension in the art works, which is being nuanced and transgressed. The works make their appearance as formal paintings that, in reality, not only are formal but also are equally personal and language-related.

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