Photo by Søren Rønholt
Bjarne Werner Sørensen
Born 1960, lives and works in Copenhagen.
He graduated from the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark in 1985. He has exhibited extensively in the USA, Denmark and abroad. He has held artist residencies in Helsinki, Paris, Bergen, Berlin, Iceland and New York. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, and his work is represented in numerous public collections and institutions, including The National Gallery of Denmark and The New Carlsberg Foundation.
Bjarne Werner Sørensen has been painting for most of his life. He was born in 1960 in Denmark and lives and works in Copenhagen. In 1985 he graduated from the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in Aarhus, Denmark. Although the organic substance he releases onto the canvas may appear Nordic and dramatic, the nature of his work is not only Nordic. There is a taste of the world that has a complexity beyond graphic simplicity.
He grew up in Syria, Lebanon, and then north of Copenhagen. And he spent much of his formative years shuttling between the Faroe Islands, where his mother was born (an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway), and Copenhagen, where his father was born, and has made the rural/urban duality of this aspect of his life a defining motif of his art. His parents moved from Denmark to Iran in 1975, where he visited them. They returned to their homeland in 1979 before moving to Thailand, where they lived from 1982 to 1986, and he spent six months in Thailand in the spring of 1986.
He also owns part of his mother's childhood home in the Faroes, on the southern island of Suduroy, which he uses every year. Although he lives in Denmark, he has been active in the Faroese art scene for many years, including organizing and curating a number of exhibitions and workshops. He is also a member of the Faroese exhibition group Heystframsýningin, which held annual exhibitions from 2005 to 2015. And he has often worked with lithography at the graphic workshop Steinprent in Tórshavn.
In 1986 he settled in Copenhagen, where he still lives and works. He married Sara Bell Sørensen in 1997, and they have one daughter and two sons, born between 2000 and 2009. He has been an artist in residence in Helsinki, Paris, Bergen, Berlin, Iceland and New York. He is currently in residence in New York at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. He has exhibited widely in the USA, Denmark and abroad. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, and his work is represented in numerous public collections and institutions.
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