Sofie Bird Møller

For Wilhelm Schürmann, the prominent collector and exhibition maker from Aachen, Sofie Bird Møller is “very good at leaving things out,” and so in his introductory text he ties a ribbon for her admired omissions and overpaintings. With this individual publication, the still slender oeuvre of this student of Günther Förg is documented and comprehensively presented on its own for the first time. Perhaps the truly astonishing thing about these overpaintings – which work just as well in small format as on the large overpainted billboards that the young artist has repeatedly executed “by night” in Munich, London and Berlin – is that the subject seems made for this kind of expressive attack, as though some dreadfully boring circumstance had been waiting for precisely this intoxication, for such an explosion. The execution appears rapid, which reinforces this impression, and yet it is so precise that the puzzle-like coming together seems entirely logical. Alongside the acrylic works – Sofie Bird Møller calls her overpainted magazine pages and billboards interferences – the volume shows a whole series of reworked engravings. The artist’s interventions have the effect of retouchings, of corrections that dissolve the historical character of the source material into the timeless.