The exhibition brings together a new body of work in which Bonde returns to, and reworks, the motifs, methods and materials that have defined a career spanning more than four decades. Since emerging in the early 1980s, Bonde has consistently tested the limits of painting, treating it less as a fixed medium than as an open field of attitudes, gestures and references.
The title sets the tone. Keep on Keeping on speaks of persistence, but also of a certain point of no return: it is too late to stop, so one has to carry on. For Bonde, this is not a resigned stance but a productive one. Rather than starting from scratch, the new paintings pick up threads from earlier works and series, revisiting them with the freedom of someone who knows his own vocabulary well enough to dismantle it. In doing so, the works both invoke and disrupt the language of classical abstract painting. Sweeping gestures, saturated colour fields and drips nod to the tradition of abstract painting, yet they are repeatedly interrupted, overpainted or set against images that refuse to stay in the background. The result is painting that seems to argue with itself, embracing the grand abstract tradition while gleefully messing it up.
This tension runs through the entire exhibition, which moves between total abstraction and outright figurative painting. In some works, the brushstroke is the sole subject: oil applied in fast, layered movements that seem to erupt across the surface. In others, figuration enters the picture in the form of actual photographs that push their way into the composition, cutting through the paint like fragments of another time. Elsewhere, Bonde paints rooms, interiors and spaces that appear both familiar and slightly off, as if remembered rather than observed. Whether abstract or figurative, the paintings share an underlying biographical current. They draw on Bonde’s personal archive of images, places and encounters, layering private memory with art historical reference. As the critic Kristian Vistrup Madsen has observed, Bonde’s technique is attitude, and his content “a stacking of contexts.” ¹
The two Cool Paintings in the exhibition make this point with characteristic wit. Each is assembled from several smaller paintings on mirror foil that together form a figure, and above them hangs a large air-conditioning unit. The title is a deadpan pun: these works are, quite literally, cool paintings. Yet the joke has a serious edge. By mounting a large, industrial air-conditioning unit – identical to the one in his own studio – onto the work, Bonde underlines his long-held view of painting as an object rather than a two-dimensional surface: a thing that hangs, hums and takes up space in the room. At the same time, the air conditioner points to an exchange with its surroundings, drawing in the air around it and sending it back altered. The mirror foil does something similar, reflecting the room and the viewer and returning them as part of the image.
New Paintings / Keep on Keeping on is thus both a continuation and a stubborn act of defiance. It asks what it means to keep painting after decades of questioning painting itself, and finds an answer in the act of continuing, of returning to old images, pulling them apart and putting them back together without smoothing over the seams.
Peter Bonde graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1982 (Copenhagen, Denmark). He taught at the Funen Art Academy (Odense, Denmark, 1994–1996) and was professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1996–2005). He represented Denmark alongside Jason Rhoades at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, and in 2019 his works were shown at the 58th Venice Biennale as part of Danh Vo’s installation. Bonde has exhibited at Sorø Kunstmuseum (Sorø, Denmark, 2021), Galerie Barbara Thumm (Berlin, Germany, 2024), Nino Mier Gallery (Brussels, Belgium, 2024; Los Angeles, USA, 2021), and Martin Asbæk Gallery (Copenhagen, Denmark, 20 2026), among others. His works are part of major private and public collections in Denmark and elsewhere, such as the Danish National Gallery, ARoS, Trapholt Museum for Moderne Kunst, Esbjerg Art Museum, Elgiz Collection in Turkey, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and Axa Northern Stern in Germany. Bonde lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.
¹ Kristian Vistrup Madsen, catalogue essay “Ride or Die” in Peter Bonde: Unclaimed Baggage Will Be Destroyed, Sorø Kunstmuseum, 2021 (translated from Danish; please check against the original catalogue).
