The Weight of Words and Paint
Claus Carstensen began his creative life through the rhythm of poetry. Before the canvas became his primary field, he was a writer, selling collections of poems to schoolmates in the hallways of his youth. His first published work, Flieger sind Sieger/Helte, appeared in 1975. This early preoccupation with language never truly left him. Even as he moved into visual arts, his practice remained tied to the written word, resulting in fifteen collections of poems, five essay collections, and four anthologies. He studied comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen while simultaneously training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts between 1977 and 1983. This dual education created a tension between the precision of text and the messiness of paint.
His visual language emerged alongside a group known as De Unge Vilde, or The Young Wild Ones. This movement sought to reclaim the physical act of painting, moving away from the strict conceptualism that had dominated the era. In the early 1980s, his work took on a specific, layered quality. He used photocopying, image distortion, and arbitrary manipulations to create a sense of visual noise. His paintings often feel like the surfaces of a city—layers of posters and promotional imagery that have been weathered, superimposed, and stripped away. It is a way of looking at the world through the debris of urban life.
Presence and Place
The geography of his career moved from the classrooms of Copenhagen to the streets of Cologne, Germany, where he lived and worked from 1986 to 1993. This period of residence in Germany coincided with a significant expansion of his reach. He eventually returned to Copenhagen, where he served as a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1993 to 2002. His work has been part of major international dialogues, representing Denmark at the Sydney Biennale in 1992, the Sao Paolo Biennale in 1994, and the Venice Biennale in 1997. These appearances placed his specific, often nihilistic approach to two-dimensional surfaces into a global context.
His practice extends beyond the flat surface of a canvas into the physical space of the city and the weight of bronze. In 2016, he completed a commission titled Doing Time/Critical Mass, which consists of five life-size bronze figures installed at Storstrøm Fængsel. This work moves his exploration of human presence into a heavy, permanent medium. Whether working in lithography with the Steinprent workshop in the Faroe Islands or creating large-scale installations, his focus remains on how images and objects occupy space and how they decay over time.
