Marat - Who Was Corday? by Bjørn Nørgaard Photo: Courtesy of CAFA Art Museum

It is universally accepted that artists see the world from a different angle or even create worlds of their own, but what about taking our world and turning it into something else? What happens then? Danish artist Bjørn Nørgaard's exhibition Bjørn Nørgaard: Re-modelling the World - again again again may satisfy your curiosity.

Opened on Friday at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Art Museum, the exhibition boasts 77 pieces of Nørgaard's works created from 1960s to present,  including large tapestries he made for the queen of Denmark. Through these works he shows his concern for and critical attitude toward history and reality, in which the world we are familiar with is broken into small puzzle pieces and rebuilt again in strange new ways.

"Nørgaard has a strong exploratory spirit and immense creativity… Over the course of his artistic career, Nørgaard has created a surprising body of work that constantly challenges convention," said Wang Huangsheng, director of the CAFA Art Museum.

Breaking from convention

Born in 1947, Nørgaard became one of the most important artists in Denmark during the 1960s. Working primarily with sculpture, he also has engaged in installation art. His performance art, films and graphic works are also on display at the exhibition.

Walking into the exhibition the audience can first have a look at Nørgaard's early performance art in which he explores the intersection between action and representation while trying to reinterpret and affect the world.

For instance, the film From the Cellar of the Student Council shows some performance art Nørgaard carried out in 1967 during which he rearranges different every day materials and objects such as pots and pants. A part of his first solo exhibition, the work aims to change the way we perceive familiar things and thus imbues them with new possibilities.

In this work he used wooden frames and wire netting to divide the exhibition space. Such grids frequently appear in his later works as a way to structure and alter the way we experience the world.

Also on exhibit is a film showing what is probably Nørgaard's most famous work from his early period, The Female Christ, a type of performance art that he refers to as "happenings." For this work his wife, Lene Adler Petersen, walked naked with a Christian cross through the Copenhagen Stock Exchange in 1969. Controversial for the time, the work tried to arouse a gender-political discussion of values in modern society.

1970's Horse Sacrifice is most likely one of Nørgaard's most controversial works. To demonstrate the irrationality and cruelty of the Vietnam War, the artist killed and dissected a horse. The pieces of the dissected horse were preserved in 199 air-tight cans.

In Repetitions (1976), a series of seven graphic prints, Nørgaard represents different art projects and subjects that inspired him in the early years of his career up to 1976, which include war, rituals, Nordic mythology, Maoism, religion, politics, among others. This broad range of subject matters are also seen in his later work.

Rethinking history

Marat - Who Was Corday? (1976-82) is Nørgaard's reinterpretation of Jacques-Louis David's classic painting The Death of Marat and is an example of the artist's thoughts on history.

According to history, French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat was shot dead by a woman named Charlotte Corday in 1793. In the installation, Nørgaard made a plaster cast of himself which acts as a Marat shrouded in bandages as he sits in a bathtub, holding his own diary in an outstretched hand. 

But while David's focus was on Marat in his painting, Nørgaard turns his attention to Corday. In front of Marat is a grid wall on which pictures of various women are hung, thus prompting viewers to reexamine the identity of Marat's female killer.

 "Of course, history has some facts, events that happen. But when time goes on, we start to change views on what has happened. Sometimes you have to break down and look at it again and see what was happening. So it is a process of turning down and building up all the time," Nørgaard explained to the Global Times.

Allegorical ideas

During the 1980s, Nørgaard was commissioned to create decorative works meant for public display. One of these commissions was for the Panum Institute in Denmark. For the work, he created 12 large-scale ceramic figures that he called Allegorical Figures. Among the eight figures at the exhibition, visitors can see a skillful combination of the medical world with everyday experiences in hospitals drawing allegories to mythology, religion, fairy tales and fantastical historical references. 

With these imaginative images, Nørgaard shows how the world can be written and remodeled by the imagination of a single individual.

After the 1980s, he continued his critical attitude toward society and politics. In his later performance art such as World Peace Economy (1996-2001), he raised questions about human and cultural development against the background of a global economy.

In 2005, he drew inspiration from the marble sculpture Venus de Milo creating a series of works related to this goddess from ancient Greece. In the Promised Land, a recreation of the Venus de Milo is blindfolded and fenced in a cage, turning the ancient goddess into an allegorical personification of a blindfolded Lady Justice, sans arms, symbolic scales and sword.

As an artist, Nørgaard has continually shown his passion about foreign cultures, including Eastern culture, in his creations over the years. One of these, a performance art piece entitled Sisyphus Meets Confucius and Gets His First Cup of Green Tea, was performed in Beijing a few years ago. 

According to Wang, Nørgaard often comes to China to research and experiment with materials such as ceramics and textiles, and in many of his works blends Eastern and Western culture in innovative ways.

According to Nørgaard many of the works at the exhibition, mostly the sculptures, were created in China. "Many of the sculptures were done together with Chinese artists. In this process, we learn from each other, you change your view when you change your position. So the sculptures I have done in China are very different from what I've done in Europe," he added.