Irene Christensen captures life-force thunder in her artwork. For her, nature is a primal space wherein she develops her oeuvre from concerns with environmental and women’s issues using fantastic imagery. Her background is Norwegian, but she has spent an artistic lifetime in Costa Rica and the Everglades interpreting those environments’ lush flora and fauna with warmth and excitement to enhance her historical Nordic background. Awed by nature’s preeminence, she has developed her own images to articulate her strong relationships with the untamed as an inescapable rich bond with humanity, approaching her work as streams of consciousness concerning constantly moving cultures to realize pieces evoking native folklore entities in entirely new iterations.
Christensen’s Irazu, inspired by an active Costa Rican volcano, blends dreamlike, mythologically referenced images in saturated colors with bold painterly technique, renderings of the mighty “El Coloso” volcano which historically unleashes catastrophes on indigenous villages on the volcano’s flanks. Some artistic results, such as those in Worlds Within, red amorphous images nestled behind metal geometric grids animate monochromatic graphic structured overlays on bright pigmented forms. Her painting, Maori Woman, alludes to traditional facial tattoos, known as tā moko, sacred and permanent expressions of a person’s ancestry (whakapapa), social status, and personal history. Because Māori consider the head the most sacred part of the body, these facial markings are especially significant, serving as markers of unique visual identity and a badge of honor.
Some of her pieces are biomorphic featuring abstract, fluid designs mimicking organic material, paying homage to Miró and Arp, mining the human subconscious for inspired results. Costa Rican Dreams is a cornucopia of images with primal undertones, acrylic inks on handmade paper, engaging emotions and memory wherein the artist approaches her subjects to actualize in symbols an alternate world, allowing dreams and reality to meet. Guided chance was at the heart of Arp’s vision, and he believed that society’s regulated reasoning was somewhat delusional, the natural world being governed by both logic and chaos; he saw art as an opportunity to recover the natural and unreasonable order. It can be said that some of Christensen’s pieces, such as Tango, like Arp’s, seize on accessing underlying spirit, making visually manifest, the human dreamworld. Tango represents 15 years of the artist’s paintings and assemblages as interactive experiences to highlight themes of transcendence in space and time.
Christensen’s artwork is seen in homes, galleries and collections across Europe, Asia, and the United States and was featured at the “Personal Structures” exhibition, organized by the Global Art Affairs Foundation, and showcased during the 2017 Venice Art Biennale. Affiliated with several professional groups, she is a member of the Norwegian Association of Visual Artists, Newark Arts Council, and the National Arts Club and contributes as a board member to Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) in Florida. Museums that have presented her work include Galería Nacional in Costa Rica, Norsk Skogmuseum in Norway, and a series of renowned museums in the United States. Beyond this, her work has graced many other art centers and galleries worldwide. After having studied with Richard Pousette-Dart, his works’ meditative and spiritual mien can be gleaned as influences on Christensen. Her Concertina Books and Drawings Installation “PERSONAL STRUCTURES” shown in Venice, Italy, highlighted visual melodic beauty in the symbolic tellings of the artist’s cognitive and psychological perception in accordion book format. A concertina instrument expands aurally with dulcet tones, and here, Christensen accomplishes this visually in cascades of painted connected representations unfolding to delight viewers in a pictorial waterfall.
Her ability to express emotions takes a darker turn in her piece Perilous Journey in which disembodied faces hover above a perturbed sea, foreboding imminent danger. She includes found objects to heighten visual drama in other pieces, always manifesting symbolic emotional intensity throughout her prodigious art-making.
In a contrasting positive vein, the artist’s depiction of Lady Liberty in New York Never Sleeps inspired by the goddess Libertas and Our Lady in the Harbor, Christensen’s imagery underscores our country’s founding and ongoing striving for human freedom. She offers that her work does not reproduce directly from nature. Rather, it is nature plus the ancient and modern symbols created by humans transformed through the imagination.
The personal structures in the works flow intuitively, revealing a surreal, interior world of creatures where natural symmetry is rare, animals are phantasmagoric and volcanic geologic forms threaten. Icons of ancient civilizations reappear referencing ancient petroglyphs with animalistic folklore playing a part subconsciously, serving almost as human fundamental components, in a sense, archetypes.
Her paintings, accordion books, drawings, and small sculptures are her unique artistic legends. They contain all symbols and densely worked images, all translations of her sense of nature. Her art moves through representative visual time, transforming the almost inexplicable into entities uniting her subjects’ divergent qualities.
Her paintings, accordion books, drawings, and small sculptures are her unique artistic legends. They contain all symbols and densely worked images, all translations of her sense of nature. Her art moves through representative visual time, transforming the almost inexplicable into entities uniting her subjects’ divergent qualities. Working intuitively, she explores the human psyche painted as if through a primal lens, so that pieces are windows on space and time, her personal mythology translating nature into limited human comprehensions. She likens our world to a ship where “we’re all sailing around the sun together,” the rich heritage of her native Norway augmenting her already vibrant artistic heart beating in both urban and tropical environs, her paintings, drawings and assemblages, efforts to comprehend an immutable, unfathomable cosmos. Christensen remains a formidable presence in global art. G&S
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