Mie Olise Kjærgaard, Skipping the beat

La galerie Ketabi Bourdet a la grande joie de présenter la première exposition personnelle de Mie Olise Kjærgaard à Paris, Skipping the Beat.

Ketabi Bourdet is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Danish artist Mie Olise Kjærgaard with the gallery, Skipping the Beat.

Born in 1974 in Denmark, Mie Olise Kjærgaard has developed a distinctive pictorial language, where the monumentality of large-scale painting is intertwined with a reflection on the representation of women today. Through her canvases, she invents a new feminine narrative that resonates with our time: a generation of women asserting themselves, claiming visibility and space. Her works stage universes populated by active, present, and unrestrained women—athletes, musicians, mothers, friends—sometimes intertwined with mythical or fantastical creatures.

In Kjærgaard’s work, lived experience transforms into allegory. Everyday gestures—carrying a child, holding a racket, moving through space—become fragments of an iconography that is at once tender and wild. The maternal figure, far from the immobile Madonna, unfolds as a force in motion: carrying her children on untamed beasts or confronting precarious ground with energy and humor. The artist thus proposes a new image of womanhood: not fixed or passive, but always in the making.

With Skipping the Beat, this research finds its terrain in rhythm, music, and the instability of gesture. On canvas, bodies bend, stretch, run, ride, or play music with an intensity that may at times seem off beat. A tennis racket becomes a guitar, a woman plays piano while suspended on a horse (Flying piano, Riding drums, 2025), an orchestra performs adrift on a raft (And the Sky was made of Ametyst, 2025). These scenes are not rehearsed performances but lived improvisations, where music circulates as latent energy, carried by bodies in motion.

Rhythm here is unstable: gestures collide, fall out of sync, skip a beat (hence the title Skipping the Beat). Yet it is precisely in this instability that the artist finds her own tempo. Her figures do not seek perfection; they fumble, improvise, begin again. To be off-balance and out of time, far from being a failure, becomes for Kjærgaard the very condition of freedom—away from constant control.

Her painting gesture channels this energy: lines tremble, colors vibrate, bodies overflow the frame. Historically, painting has confined the female figure within composed images offered to the gaze. Here, women escape those limits: the painting itself breaks through the edges of the canvas, extending onto the gallery walls in a mural, revealing the frame only by refusing to obey it. Thus, Skipping the Beat is not a mere theme, but the foundation of a pictorial condition. Gestures double back, rhythms blur, balance falters—yet movement continues. What could seem dissonant becomes the very site of creation. Figures adjust, repeat, resume; they inhabit a present that is unstable yet vital. Kjærgaard’s works remain suspended, alive precisely because they refuse any form of completion.

Mie Olise Kjærgaard (b. 1974, Denmark) is a visual artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation. Trained in architecture at the Aarhus School of Architecture and The Bartlett (UCL, London), and holding an MFA from Central Saint Martins (2008), she has developed a distinctive visual language centered on movement, agency, and female subjectivity. Her work is characterized by expressive, often large-scale gestures that explore freedom and embodiment. Kjærgaard has presented numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Trapholt Museum (Denmark), where her exhibition Agile Aggressions is currently on view, the Karpidas Foundation in Dallas (Texas, 2023), the Museo de Arte Acarigua (Venezuela), and the Skive New Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at major institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Torrance Art Museum (USA). A recipient of several international residencies — including Skowhegan (USA), ISCP (New York), and Art Omi (USA) — Mie Olise Kjærgaard lives and works in Copenhagen.