The story behind
Michael Kvium (born 1955) is a Danish visual artist.
Kvium grew up in a Catholic home and is out of a family of eight children. He went on the Catholic Sct. Ibs School, and the whole family went together to the Latin Mass every Sunday.
In 1973 he got a job as a magazine illustrator at Horsens Folkeblad. Here he worked for six years as a cartoonist. Here he was i.a. helped create the satire magazine Muleposen, where local news and topics were presented with a satirical angle.
Kvium was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1979-85. After commuting between Horsens and Copenhagen, he moved to Copenhagen.
Horsens Art Museum has followed Michael Kvium since he was very young and today owns the largest collection of Kvium’s works.
Together with Christian Lemmerz, Sonny Tronborg and Ingunn Jørstad, he formed the performance group WORST in 1985. Here they made i.a. the short film Porridge. He worked on setting up the group’s performances, and some of the themes from these were later further developed in his paintings.
The themes that Kvium addresses in his art are often universal subjects of conflict such as transience, the body, the nooks and crannies of the psyche. He confronts being human for better or worse. The figures are often androgynous and with similarities to the artist’s own facial features. Over the years, he has built his own symbol universe. Many of the works include lemons, eyes, blind spots, brain mass and red sausages, just as he often deals with topics such as body deformity, blindness, stupidity and similar topics.