TROELS WÖRSEL
THE DANISH PAVILION

Denmark’s official representative at the 52nd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia is the painter Troels Wörsel. He was born in 1950 in Aarhus, Denmark, but moved to Munich as far back as 1974. Since then he has lived outside of Denmark. Today he lives and works in Cologne (Germany) and Pietrasanta (Italy).

Troels Wörsel’s painting addresses the art of painting. Whereas his first works were influenced by late 1960s Pop, Minimalism and Concept Art, he subsequently opposed his roots: Since the late 1970s, he has developed a vein of painting which is an uninterrupted, expansive declaration of love of painting on the one hand and a deeply reflected investigation into the essence of painting on the other.

Today, it is not possible to attach a label to Troels Wörsel’s painting. His insistence on painting and his focused, methodical investigations into the properties of the medium quite literally positions him in a class of his own within Danish and international art.

Conventional painterly discussions about figuration versus abstraction, the plane versus an illusionistic three-dimensionality or gesture versus concretion are useless if one seeks to identify Troels Wörsel’s painting and place it within an art historical context. On the other hand, the very same issues are crucial if one wishes to understand Troels Wörsel’s painterly project.

Troels Wörsel’s painting deals with semantics rather than formalism and is what one might term unprejudiced. The art of painting is not used to present or promote personal beliefs or emotions. Nor does one find ideological or dogmatic attitudes on how the art of painting should be practiced. In this respect Troels Wörsel’s oeuvre constitutes a systematic investigation into the art of painting – and an open dialogue with the great masters of art history.

Troels Wörsel has a vibrant relationship with art history. He feels, entirely without any excesses of sentiment, as part of the history of painting. Indeed, his paintings combine innovation and experimentation with a striving towards a classical, monumental idiom.

For the Danish Pavilion at the 52nd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia Troels Wörsel has painted a number of new pieces.

Wörsel has received prestigious accolades such as the Carnegie Art Award (2002), the Thorvaldsen Medal (2004) and the Eckersberg Medal (1995). He is also represented in a wide range of Danish and international collections such as Statens Museum for Kunst (Denmark), Louisiana, Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), Moderna Museet (Sweden), Museum of Contemporary Art (Finland), Städtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany) and Bayrische Staatsgemäldesammlung Munich (Germany).