It seems that Danish artist Kathrine Ærtebjerg has set herself the task of painting the lived experience of existentiality, identity and sexuality as seen through a dream prism; one which refracts reality in a phantasmatic manner and allows us to view it in surprising but recognisable ways that cause it to look entirely magical.

Ærtebjerg creates images, which combine different and contradictory expressions: the naive, the vulgar, the expressive, the humourous, the spiritual, the cloying. The apparently childish universe that is conjured up in clear and radiant colours is however in no respect innocent or simpel, but rather complex and ambiguous.
Ærtebjerg's paintings may at a superficial glance resemble the enchanted iconography of the children's fairytale, but a warning should be inserted that this material is for adults, even though the borderland between these two states, that of the child and the adult, is in a sense a fundamental theme.
This richly illustrated book surveys Ærtebjerg's work from the past decade through essays written by Art Historians Barry Schwabsky, Ann Lumbye Sørensen and Rune Gade.