Coming Clean

Martin Spang Olsen is recognized in Denmark primarily as an artist, public speaker, writer, stuntman, and actor. But his professional career encompasses many more merits (such as philosopher, religious historian, health and movement expert, therapist, musician, composer, singer and more).  Apart from pictorial art, his professional production includes academic books, drawings for children, film and TV productions, music composition and poetry. As a son of Ib Spang Olsen and Nulle Øigaard, Martin was born into a family of well-known Danish artists and held his first exhibition at the age of nineteen, in Galleri Gammelstrand.

About Martin's paintings

By Dominika Loburska, Danish art historian:

‘Martin Spang Olsen’s paintings unfold places and landscapes he has visited and seen, but this is not a precise photographic image that meets the viewer. Quite to the opposite, Martin creates a kaleidoscopic expression by a burst of colours and light, with the figurative motif slowly dissolving into a larger sensual bombardment of several layers that at once seem well-known and strange.

In several of his landscapes, Martin describes a mirror reflection, in which the surrounding landscape is mirrored or dissolved entirely in the painted lake. Thus, the pictorial room is converted into a strongly colour-saturated, abstract place in which the observer is forced to reflect upon the mirroring, colours, and the dreaming room created here. In the abstract flitter of colours, Martin Spang Olsen catches several moments rather than just one and describes with his painting more than we can observe with the naked eye. Light and colour are intensified, shadows replaced by mirror images in different shades, and the picture turns into an over-saturated reality where time disappears, and several dimensions meet.”