Photo by Søren Rønholt

Bjarne Werner Sørensen (b. 1960) lives and works in Copenhagen. He is a 1985 graduate of the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark. He has exhibited extensively in the USA, Denmark and abroad. He has been an artist in residence 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.

From Vrå-udstillingen 2023, photo by Birgir Thor Møller

Bjarne Werner Sørensen is a Danish-Faroese artist known for his abstract paintings and graphic works. His art is characterized by organic forms, rhythmic patterns, and a gestural use of color and texture. His works use a rich palette and often create contrasts between warm and cool tones. Colors can be intense and vibrant or muted and subtle, depending on the piece. They often have fluid, organic forms that evoke natural structures such as water, leaves, or microscopic organisms. A recurring theme in his art is a sense of movement. A dynamic balance between improvisation and control is achieved through repetitive patterns and lines that create a rhythmic balance in the compositions. Many of his paintings have complex layers of texture that add depth and invite the viewer to examine the surface more closely. His art is often inspired by the structures and systems of nature, but rendered abstractly and often with a meditative quality.

Although the organic substance he releases onto the canvas may seem 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 was born in Denmark, the fourth of five children, but the family actually lived in Syria at the time and later in Beirut, Lebanon, where he grew up, and when he was six, in 1966, the family moved to Denmark, settling north of Copenhagen.

He spent much of the following years shuttling between summers in the Faroe Islands, an Atlantic archipelago between Iceland and Norway, where his mother was born, and Copenhagen, where his father was born. These movements have made the rural-urban duality of this aspect of his life a defining motif of his art. In 1975, his parents moved from Denmark to Iran, where he went to visit them. They returned to their homeland in 1979 before moving to Thailand, where they lived from 1982 until 1986, when he visited them and traveled around the country for six months 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 mainly in Denmark, he has been active in the Faroese art scene for many years. He has organized and curated a number of exhibitions and workshops. He was also a member of the Faroese exhibition group Heystframsýningin, which held annual exhibitions from 2005 to 2015. In addition, he has often worked with lithography at the graphic arts workshop Steinprent in Tórshavn.

ARTICLES

  • From One Springs the Other / Helene Johanne Christensen

    It is from the arrangement of lines and the relation between colours, shapes, surfaces and layers, from the tension between foreground and background, vertical and horizontal, boundaries and infinity, that the moods and meanings arise in the works.

  • Where the Coordinates Intersect / Nils Ohrt

    When speaking about his art, Bjarne Werner Sørensen uses the expression “coordinates”: a reference to the axes of experiences and influences, within which his art takes shape.

  • Impressions / Erik Steffensen

    Bjarne Werner Sørensen’s nature is not only Nordic. He has tasted the world; his work has a complexity beyond graphic simplicity. In the new works, which Bjarne Werner Sørensen is exhibiting at North Atlantic House, painting has come into focus.

  • Panorama / Mai Misfeldt

    It is as if there is nothing to stand on, and that you are looking directly in or down into a world, where nothing is ever clear-cut and where there is no solid foundation. The paintings are abstract and do not portray anything immediately recognisable.

  • MORE TEXTS

    See an overview of the numerous articles about the work of Bjarne Werner Sørensen that are contained on this site .