Words from the critics

Magda Høgh’s paintings reflect the deep intensity which stems from her lifelong passion for colour and light. As a young girl she discovered the joy of painting while working beside her mother, who painted in an environment that knew mush about her “pictures” but little about how art could be used to express abstraction as well as reality.

 

But she wanted colour, light, and to be challenged by the creation of each of her paintings.

Her first canvases reveal classical compositions inspired by her early teachers, especially Svend Elkjær, whose paintings captured natural-settings motifs with a twist. She was influenced by his inner sense of rebellion and provocation that led him to leave blank areas on the canvas – a style which was intended to contrast the touched against the untouched, a conscience searching for balance between the subject and its origin.

 

Other teachers followed, and Magda Høgh’s painting skills and techniques were done in oil; but she felt something was missing - perhaps it was the spontaneous use of colours. When, around 1987, acrylic paint became more available, she tries them, first on paper and later on canvas. She discovered she liked their intensity, ease of use and how they worked in transparent layers. Expressive strokes asserting sharp contrasts among the other elements became her trademark.

 

Magda Høgh had found her style. From then on her work erupted into a profusion of sketches, notes, and experiments. Innumerable pieces of paper as canvas after canvas were put to use. Her many years of patient waiting were suddenly rewarded; and a vast quantity of paintings followed, each reflecting her professional self-confidence. Now, working alone, she grow artistically stronger.

 

The realities of everyday life eventually made it necessary for her to enter the world of commercial art, which she did through a visit to Ellen Flint, the person behind Galleri Flint in Århus, Denmark. Magda Høgh’s first steps into the commercial world were an unqualified success – all her paintings were sold.

 

Satisfaction and self-confidence intact, she began to demonstrate a self-discipline which was reflected in her choice of colours and their perpetual break between solid and transparent, cogent and spontaneous, light itself and its opposite: darkness. Never black, but rather a deep enveloping warmth, in coolness, or as a transition between the earth and its natural colours.

 

But she does not simply transfer what she sees in the landscape that surrounds her to the canvas. The earth, sky, and their boundlessness are instead elements she beguiles us with, sometimes evident, other times not so evident. Remaining is an intuitive command of canvas and painting. Some paintings cool, some warm. Others reveal a vibrating fragility that are provocative and stimulating, mellow and latent all at the same time.

 

Lisbeth Tolstrup

Critic AICA

 

 

The picture universe of happiness

 

Through her artwork Magda Høgh conveys a powerful and intense artistic awareness of the world that surrounds her. One cannot help but be moved by her paintings– through which she conveys a contagious vitality. Each piece of her work is filled with a brightness and joy which seems to radiate from her inner most self.

 

Living in one of the most scenic areas of Denmark, at the foot of the “Hills of Mols” and on the edge of Begtrup Bay looking across to the beautiful peninsula of Helgenæs, she has her hands on the pulse of the land, air, sea and sky.

 

The never ending influence of the beautiful countryside is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Magda Høgh’s artistic talents. Her daily encounters with nature are a source of inspiration. She takes these inspirations and models them, reconstructs them, and continuously translates them in to picturesque shapes depicting “inner” landscapes.

 

Each painting is characterised by its smooth and elegant strokes of light and expressed as glowing colours like those of the changing seasons reflecting nature’s intoxicating vigour. With boldly expressive shapes and colours, her many paintings exhibit a poetic and musical atmosphere as a non-figurative, cubist idiom built up through the use of powerful colours.

 

Looking at a picture as a whole or at each minute detail, her paintings demonstrate a unique sense of balance and dynamics. She uses a special brushwork technique that intensifies each painting’s surface, giving it an exciting textural structure. Together with the palette’s many expressive hues, where intense radiance compliments the bright colour compositions, the two-dimensional works of art express not only joie de vivre but also drama.                    

 

Rigmor Lovring

Art historian

 

 

 


 

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