Trine Søndergaard (b. 1972) has become one of the Nordic countries’ most important artists and one of the few Danish photographers who has received international recognition. She made her debut in the 1990s, and since then, the interest in her work has been on a steady incline. Sondergaard has received the prestigious August Renger Patzsch Award, published award-winning books, and held exhibitions at home and abroad.
The exhibition WORKS presents Trine Søndergaard’s long spanning photographic exploration of depicting the invisible. She explores portrait photography as a genre, but her objective is not to present us with the truth about an individual. Instead, she insistently poses questions about how the depiction of a person’s appearance is capable of both communicating and hiding an inner life.
Questions such as these intertwine themselves in Søndergaard’s interest in women’s historical clothes and jewellery – a common subject in her photography. Through history, traditional clothes and jewellery has had specific work-related or social functions; it aimed to protect women from the elements, or signal their social class to the rest of the world. The women in Søndergaard’s portraits are always averting their gaze, and the eye contact that we cannot obtain from them compels us to look closer.
The exhibition WORKS displays photography from 2005-2021. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Gothenburg Museum of Art.
Source: The Black Diamond