Bjarne Werner Sørensen (born 1960) is a Danish-Faroese artist based in Copenhagen. He is 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. He uses a rich palette and often creates contrasts between warm and cool tones. Depending on the piece, colors can be intense and vibrant or muted and subtle. His pieces 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. He achieves a dynamic balance between improvisation and control through repetitive patterns and lines that create rhythmic compositions. Many of his paintings have complex layers of texture that add depth and invite viewers to examine the surfaces more closely. His art is often inspired by the structures and systems of nature but is rendered in an abstract style with a meditative quality.
He was raised in Syria and Lebanon, and then in the north of Copenhagen. He spent a good part of his formative years shuttling back and forth between the Faroe Islands, where his mother was born, and Copenhagen, where his father was born. This country-city duality became a defining motif of his art. The Faroe Islands are an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway. His parents moved from Denmark to Iran in 1975, and their son visited them there. They returned to Denmark in 1979 before moving to Thailand in 1982, where they lived until 1986. During this time, he attended art school and, after graduating in 1985, spent six months in Thailand in 1986. He has exhibited widely in the USA, Denmark, and abroad. He has been in artist residencies in Helsinki, Bergen, Paris, Berlin, Iceland, and New York. He is also a 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.
Statement
There is a solid core, a body and other elements that sprout from this form. The composition of the paintings is central and is twisted and turned throughout the process of painting. When they are painted from the one side, the paintings are then rotated and ultimately worked on from all the other sides. The works are all the same size, but they appear very diverse in color and composition.
The paintings are based on a basic experience of perception of motion, and become an interplay between chaos, energy and order. Scattered and gathered at once, they form an organic geometry as if put in a constantly changing formula. The brushstrokes and the encounters between the colors are visible, and highlight the concrete physical process in the painting. The works cycle between the immediate tactile sense of the materiality, and the uncontrolled wanderings of the associations. An experience of space opening behind the surface.
The paintings are abstractions. They do not portray anything immediately recognizable. Stressing movement and contrast, the gestural applied colors and forms make for compositions imprinted with a variety of natural phenomena. The tangled webs of lines and convoluted planes that cover the canvas represent, if anything, inner forces of nature.
Nature is any involuntary development and transition; an endeavor that has no awareness of being bound by time or limited by space. If the tree knew of its final shape and height, it could be a question for every single twig, because it would constantly have to relate to something given. It could not exist
For the indefinite, take the example of nature, it is characteristic that it contains no consciousness of its beginning or end, it proceeds, it exists. Its cessation is not bound to anything other than time, and thus cannot be predicted or postponed.
Improvisation is an unfolding of nature. Exploring nature without being taught, as a continuation of matter unfolding. Improvisation becomes an extension of the exploration of nature into consciousness: nature coming back to itself.