SVEND AAGE SØRENSEN

ABOUT SVEND AGE
Signature
Some painters find a painting language early on, to stay in it for the rest of their days - so you can say that the 'language' is their signature. Anyone can immediately tell who the author is.
St. Aage explored several languages. The abstract – the cubist and a kind of stylized naturalism, and like most painters he worked towards a synthesis of it all.

This book does not claim to show great factuality - really, we just want to show a small section of Svend Aage's work, which so many Christians and Christianshavns knew and loved.
I do not know Svend Aage's life and painting history at all - and for the last several years, when I was close to Svend Aage, he lived his secret life in a small retirement apartment in the attic above the Gallopperiet. Here, tired of the commotion, he had retired after looking after the Gallopperie for decades. And here he lived together with his artistic life's work, which is now part of the Staden's Museum for Art's permanent collection.

Language series
Sv. Ah. had a period in the 1970s and 80s when he explored cubism seriously and passionately and laid the foundations for his later works there. Later came cap concretism. Therefore, the pages of the catalog show a – hopefully meaningful – mixture of his different forms of expression. You have to remember that a painter has a memory like an elephant and can suddenly continue a theme he was working on twenty years ago - as if nothing had happened - at most a small stylistic quantum leap. The viewer can consider the catalog as a Rosetta stone with different painting languages ​​and draw their own conclusions.

The Minefield, Christianshavn and Christiania
Svend Aage arrived in Christiania in 1973 after a merry period in the Minefield (café Nick) and a subsequent job as a lifeguard and poster printer at
Kofoed School.
Soon after moving to Fristaden, he opened the Gallopperiet together with Loppe-Benny, which was later nicknamed: Stadens Museum for Kunst. Here he stayed, looked after and served creative souls for 35 years, with humility, determination and a sense of duty of the old school – the socialist school.
St. Ah. was a socialist democrat. While waiting for guests at the Gallopperiet, he painted.

Parnasset
In these times when the media calls out for young art and 'educated' artists - as if you can be taught to be an artist? - is it nice to have known a true artistic nature like Svend Aage. For him, Parnasset was a city in Russia and he preferred to give away his pictures. And I don't think he knew the high artistic value of his work.

Hippies in Bådsmandsstrædes Barracks
Apparently it was a source of eternal fun for him that the hippies – of all people – had settled in a barracks. His pictures show huge amounts of military caps, bowler and hat lady hats, hippie hats. His cubism is transferred to the cap and hat shapes, where the military, capital and
the anarchist perform a Kafkaesque hat dance, with a sprinkling of wig blocks and gins... Where did he get that from?
Was it about the absurdity of existence or the cap-divided bourgeois society with crosses and ribbons and caps on? Curiously - and he has never, as far as is known - explained this astonishing hat fascination to anyone. Or rather: we didn't ask in time.

Creamy yellow, drop varnish, cobalt blue and strong green
Actually, he has flattened the three-dimensional cubism, (recorded) his political message and with a sense of pleasure colored these almost concrete compositions with his very specific color attitude. Creamy yellow, frosted, cobalt blue, strong green, punctuated by sudden bursts of gray in gray.
Svend Aage's strange universe:
A strange master from Christiania.
If only he had lived a few more years and experienced this simple, loving book and the
upcoming exhibition of his life's work.

Ingrid Kiopmanhafn – Borum, Copenhagen d.11. April 2012