About Sys Svinding

 Sys Svinding's work is marked by a tremendous awareness of culture and Art History, and a respect for tradition - both as a constraint, as a source for her own interpretation, and as a release for the potential of stone. At the same time she has transcended confining labels such as figuration, concretion, and abstraction. With her formal and substantial references to sculptural tradition and to our cultural history, Sys Svinding makes a conscious choice to work with primordial and universal themes and motifs, perhaps precisely because of her abstract mode of expression. She executes a sculptural heritage that unites the prehistoric and the contemporary.

 Simplification is not a goal in itself, but an inevitable approach to the true meaning of things, said Brancusi. For Sys Svinding too, art is not a realistic form, but a combination of a motif, an abstract idea and the block of stone that nature has delivered, seen through the optics of art, traded through centuries and manipulated in the present. With her sculptures she makes form concrete and precise, confers upon it a permanent status, and creates the possibility for reception well beyond the present, into the future. Her artistic intervention with the stone renders the sculpture and the form's privilege experientially possible for the viewer.

 Sys Svinding's work may be identified with stone, especially granite and diabase, and a closer look at her work reveals the wealth of sculptural potential that she exploits and explores in always new ways. Given the stone and the special character of its material, she emphasizes different aspects of its nature - and art history. We find landscape in the low horizontal sculptures, while the vertical ones point to a statuary tradition, and others yet to our joint heritage of motives - the port, the house, the boat, the axe, etc. It is characteristic of Sys Svinding's sculpture that it always fluctuates between the presence of material and artistic form, between perfect stylization and personal language and signature.

 The viewer's encounter with Sys Svinding's sculpture is both formal and deeply sensual. It is a meeting with the hard and polished, shining surface, and precise form of the material, and a simultaneous desire to touch, and let the hand trace the play between the stone's strict lines and its soft forms. Few manage, as this artist does in spite of the material's hardness and weight, to elicit a dreaming lightness and sensitivity in the stone's expression. Fortunately there are still many artists for whom stone has a special aura, for whom stone always will be a challenge, and for whom it represents the meeting between vulnerable flesh and eternity. Sys Svinding is such an artist, who concentrates on stone in its fundamental substance. She conquers its resistance, removes its excess, and reaches its essence.

Eva Botofte, MA in Art History