I have, over many years, primarily traveled to the USA and Italy. These journeys form the basis for my paintings of urban landscapes, which can be seen in the exhibition Thresholds. The works are not documentary representations, but atmospheric interpretations—fragments of memory, light, movement, and emotion.

My grandmother Lilli loved the USA. She was born there and proudly showed her baptism certificate. She traveled alone across the country by Greyhound bus, always with her violin. I wondered how she managed, as she hardly spoke any English and smoked cigars. But she had so much love in her, which poured out—especially when she played Skuld Gammel Venskab Rejn Forgo … then all hearts would open. She completed nine journeys to the USA between the ages of 50 and 70.

My grandfather Knud refused to travel to the USA. For him, the American was associated with the grandiose, the excessive, and the superficial. Instead, he turned toward the European cultural heritage—toward slowness, immersion, and historical gravity, particularly in ancient Rome and Italy.

Between these two positions, a field of tension arises, which has shaped my perspective in relation to the exhibition Thresholds.

The American once appeared as an image of energy, opportunity, and the belief that dreams could be realized through hard work. New York was “the melting pot” that opened up new and unexpected possibilities, but today that notion appears far more problematic and ambiguous.

Although the American seems changed and fills me with reflection, it is still the friends, the culture, the music, and the art that draw me there. Of course, it is not fair to equate the current American administration with all Americans.

In Italy, I stay each year in a small town where the city wall is over 3,000 years old. The significance of my present is placed in a different perspective.

In my works, I am inspired by the thresholds that arise in the encounter between these places and experiences—between the near and the distant, the remembered and the experienced.

Here, in these shifts, my new paintings for the exhibition Thresholds emerge, opening on April 18 at Galleri Franz Pedersen in Horsens.