“Lin Utzon intensely feels the mystery of things. She is sensitive to the vibration that animates the world, to this unknown force that leads the universe in its expansion and allows life to emerge into matter. Since her early graphic works, sketches of lichen and plants, up till her recent sculptures, her work attempts to express this mysterious movement that seems to obey the tune of an “invisible flute player.” (Claude d’Anthenaise, Director of Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris)
Born in Copenhagen Denmark, Contemporary artist Lin Utzon attended the Sydney Academy of Fine Arts, Australia and the Academy of Applied Arts, Copenhagen. An internationally renowned artist with a practice spanning over fifty years, Utzon is the recipient of numerous awards including the prestigious Läkerols Cultural Prize, and the cultural minister Niels Mathiasens Prize, Denmark.
Based today in Mallorca, Spain, the artist works in various media including ceramics, sculpture, painting and drawings, and has achieved a considerable reputation for her masterful choreographic expressions of form, pattern and line, a flowing graphic dance of pattern and abstraction.
Central to the artist’s contemporary practice is the Cosmic Dance series (1996-2016) a group of paintings, works on paper and sculptures that express the essence of nature as a cosmic dance. In these pieces, the artist captures the sense of mystery within nature, achieving a balance between the refined rigour of monochromatic line, an architectural sensibility and the movement of the natural world, the constant dance of transformation within life expressed in paint and clay.
In this body of work, and an impressive lifetime oeuvre, Utzon’s painterly inscription of calligraphic line and paint reveal a sensibility of great refinement echoing not only the influence of Scandinavian design but as well the artist’s connection to Japanese art. Within this convergence of sources and imagination, Utzon has created a new iconography of contemporary abstraction, based in the biomorphic form, and transformed through the use of line and a reductionist palette, emerging as a body of rigorous yet gracefully modern work.
Rosa JH Berland
