Anna Munk’s paintings collapse moments of fragile beauty from art history in on themselves, with gestural lightness and unconventional materials. Executed on billboard-scale canvases, her works are rendered in layers of rabbit-skin glue, powdered marble, wax, oil paint, shimmering eyeshadows, silver leaf, and expired lipsticks. Works are often impregnated with custom-made scents evoking old storerooms of dusty paintings or the sweet scent of powder rooms, gently fading in time. Fruit, clouds and plumes of smoke appear as fragile moments of beauty at the threshold of transformation, classical painterly motifs used as readymades. Drawing motifs directly from the digital archives of museum collections, Munk creates anachronistic clashes and distortions from these well-known images. Her continuous acts of repetition challenge art history’s settled authority, isolating its properties one by one, bending them until they very nearly break.
Munk’s practice works to give the painting a body, both in its enveloping scale and its insistence on aging. A critical curiosity about the preservation and impermanence of beauty runs throughout her practice. Each of her works imagines the beauty and energy of decay — forms fading into the background, burning buildings swallowed entirely by their own smoke. Some works allow the digital decay of poorly maintained archival images to rise to the surface. In these ways, Munk underlines the quest of endless preservation: conservators expertly caring for museum objects, patching, cleaning and brushing, working against the mark of time, ever maintaining a ‘fresh look’. A ritualistic use of cosmetics as material hints at the ever more urgent demand for perishable beauty in today’s economy of appearance. A highlighted cheekbone mirrors the crest of an apple, a digital touch-up mirrors the careful touch-up of the conservator’s hand.
Unlikely materials crescendo in Munk’s silver-plated paintings. Directly mirroring a motif under a shiny, moon-like veil, they function as a shadowy doppelgänger of their opposite work. This practice of mirroring is deployed to explore the space between.
While Munk constructs her paintings with precision and her work evokes conceptual considerations, her gestural mark-making allows each brushstroke to hold its own space on the plane, the compositions vibrating with energy. Always treating the painting as an object in space, Anna Munk works at a scale and with materials that create a multisensorial, bodily experience in a world of palm-sized images held just beneath our noses.
Anna Munk (b. 1994) lives and works in Copenhagen. She graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Painting and Pictorial Practices in 2022, and has exhibited in Korea, Norway and Germany, with solo exhibitions in Denmark and France.
