Sigurd Wendland: Reclining woman, oil on canvas

Automatic translation from Danish.

Sigurd Wendland: Reclining woman, oil on canvas, signed on the back S. Wendland '89. 115 x 146 cm. The chairman of the Conservative People's Party, Mona Juul, is selling her painting by Sigurd Wendland, which has hung in her office in Christiansborg for a number of years.
The money from the sale goes directly to Værestedet's Friends, which is an association that supports the Værestedet in Aarhus through voluntary work, collection and care.

The painting was created in a series of works with this model, Carola. It was painted with a model based on nature in 1990 in my studio on Schöneberger Hauptstraße 8. David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop lived in the house opposite. This time was marked by the upheaval of squatting, punk music and sexual debauchery, with extreme appearance in clothing, hairstyle and make-up. The sitter Carola, worked for a large international academic publishing house. In her free time she also appeared as the only woman in a gay burlesque show and was my main model with her friend for a while. Her friend, lawyer and general counsel at the University of the Arts was very proud that I used her as a model. The first exhibition of the picture was in Amsterdam in 1990 at the Drij Gratien Gallery. A whole bus full of fans traveled to the vernissage. However, when Carola's boyfriend saw the pictures I had painted with her, he immediately left the gallery and their relationship ended. At this time, Carola modeled for a number of oil paintings and watercolors of different sizes. Three large pictures were created, one of which hangs in Amsterdam today, but one and many small ones and sketches are still in my archive. Of course, we know similar depictions of women from Gustav Courbet, Egonn Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Georg Baselitz. My intention with this picture was to show a self-confident woman who dares to let herself be painted as she is, as she feels and acts. Not as an object but as a contemporary document of the declining West Berlin and its attitude to life. As the French call an orgasm La Petite mort, the little death, I wanted to depict this orgiastic life, always alternating between euphoria and suicide, in what was then West Berlin. The shelter in Aarhus (Jægergårdsgade) is an anonymous sanctuary for vulnerable adults who have psychological and social challenges, for example addiction to euphoric drugs and alcohol, loneliness and homelessness.