Peter Bonde

Born 1958.
Lives and works in Copenhagen

Peter Bonde graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Art (1976-82). He was a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts’s painting school from 1996 to 2005 and represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale in 1999 (with Jason Rhoades). Since the 1980s, Bonde has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Denmark and abroad and he is represented in all major Danish art museums including The Danish National Gallery, ARoS, the art museum Trapholt and Esbjerg Art Museum. He is also represented at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany and in the private collections Elgiz Collection,Turkey and Axa Northern Stern in Cologne.

Peter Bonde’s experiments with painting, during the past three decades, covers everything from the use of perishable materials, assemblage, collage, painting on canvases with pre-printed photographs, to the installation of video screens on the canvas.

His new works are merely oil paintings, but the experiment and the expansion of painting is still very central, as Bonde has replaced the traditional canvas with a special, ultra-reflecting mirror foil. Bonde’s colorful strokes, and spontaneous style of painting is now suddenly in constant interchange with the ultra-reflective foil, which incorporates both space and viewer inside the painting. The foil – simultaneously with mirroring the room – seems to dematerialize itself, and the painted motif is thus the only thing remaining, floating weightless in the space as quivering, luminous strokes.