The Earth Weeps

Svend Wiig Hansen’s art displays a passionate fascination with modern man’s conditions of existence. In his interpretations, sensuous awareness of one’s body and the individual’s free scope of action go hand in hand with destruction, mayhem, and fear. Primordial forces such as sexuality, motherhood and the will to live are often linked to bodily deformity and inner discord. The female figure And indeed the central female figure in this monumental, frieze-like panorama appears both powerful and threatened. Like many other of Svend Wiig Hansen’s figures, she can be read as a representative of extreme ends in life. She is isolated and part of a group at one and the same time. She is both expressive and introverted, divinely beautiful and demonic. It is not immediately clear whether she is in a state of blissful ecstasy or great pain. The greatest, most directly opposite forces of life To Svend Wiig Hansen, conflicting forces are always at play in life. His entire body of work, which includes sculpture, drawings, and graphic works in addition to his paintings, is permeated by this paradoxical, almost schizophrenic simultaneity of the greatest, most directly opposite forces of life.