In Mie Olise Kjærgaard’s exhibition NEGOTIATING POORLY WITH GRAVITY, the body is staged in a continuous state of negotiation, caught between movement and collapse, intention and consequence. Kjærgaard unfolds a pictorial world in which instability is not merely a condition, but an activating force that generates both emotional and cognitive responses in the viewer.

Across the exhibition, figures - human, canine, avian - appear subjected to an exaggerated gravitational pull. Geese and dogs become expressive agents of alternative realities, their bodies suspended in moments that hover between falling and resisting. These distortions do not signal dysfunction, but rather an acute sensitivity to the forces that bind all movement: gravity and imbalance.

To fall forward can be to run. To move is inherently to risk. In this sense, the exhibition’s title can be understood as both a literal and phenomenological proposition: Negotiating with gravity is a fundamental condition of being alive.

As Kjærgaard suggests, “Without gravity there is no risk of falling. If there is no risk, then freedom loses its intensity.” Within this proposition, the absence of risk diminishes experience. Action becomes synonymous with exposure, a voluntary exposure to consequence.

To be and to act is to embrace gravity, and the risk it entails.

Kjærgaard’s painterly language draws on a phenomenological understanding of the body, informed in part by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality, in which perception unfolds between bodies rather than within a single, isolated subject. Within the pictorial space, verticality establishes a shared, lived field of orientation. Bodies lean, displacing their centres of gravity and resisting stable positioning. Even symmetry becomes dynamic rather than static, while balance emerges not as a fixed state but as something provisional—continuously negotiated in relation to the possibility of falling.

This negotiation extends beyond the individual body into what Kjærgaard conceives as an inter-corporeal reality: a space that emerges between bodies through shared orientation and movement. Here, movement and perception are bound relationally. The figures take part in a fluctuating field of forces and recalibrations.

If the body is in constant micro-adjustment in relation to verticality, then balance is never achieved, only maintained momentarily. Painting, in Kjærgaard’s practice, becomes a means of rendering this otherwise silent bodily intelligence visible. The canvas captures what is usually imperceptible: the subtle, continuous recalibration through which we remain upright, move forward, and persist.

NEGOTIATING POORLY WITH GRAVITY ultimately proposes that to live is to inhabit risk and to lean into uncertainty without guarantees. Kjærgaard embraces this condition instead of trying to resolve it. Her figures negotiate gravity; moving with it, against it, and because of it. In doing so, they articulate a form of trust: An acceptance of life’s conditions, where instability is the ground on which freedom, action, and existence unfold.

- Niklas Skaarup, Gallery manager