Finally, we are happy to open SPECTA’s first exhibition 2021: “Absurd Birds and Other Animals”. Absurd
Birds is the overall title of Svend-Allan Sørensen’s series of 11 woodcuts of distorted, staggered figurations. In
Thordis Adalsteinsdottir’s series of drawings, we meet several other animals, who play the main role in a kind
of “reversed reality”, as the animals replace humans and illustrate human emotional states.

Since 2017, Svend-Allan Sørensen has worked on his ongoing series “Absurd Birds”, which so far consists of 11 woodcuts,
which have not been exhibited before. The woodcuts are based on old American bird illustrations and are intended as a gree-
ting to the Danish Artist Johannes Larsen (1867-1961). The illustrations have been scanned, printed, and scanned again, so that
they appear crooked and shaken, after which they are laser-cut in birch veneer. Sørensen’s bird motifs are absurd in their ap-
pearance, and they are completely out of step with Larsen’s sweetness and realism. They are quite big, up to 112 x 82 cm, a
contrast to the works of Johannes Larsen which was often tiny and never larger than the sheet of paper. They break with our
expectations. The woodcuts have a frame that defines the format of the image, and they tell us that we should focus on what
goes on within the frame. In this way, the woodcuts borrow from Johannes Larsen’s aesthetics. In the process of the works,
Svend-Allan Sørensen has used tools that do not belong in the reality of Johannes Larsen. Where he would have used pencil,
sticks and woodcut knives, Svend-Allan Sørensen has instead used a computer, scanner, and laser cutter.

In Thordis Adalsteinsdottir’s drawings, we are drawn into surfaces of patterned wallpaper, wooden floors, and
checkered clothes that both suggest and dissolve the spaces. Here, in a domestic environment, animals appe-
ar, which are often engaged in activities such as cleaning up, cleaning, socializing, relaxing. In her drawings,
Thordis Adalsteinsdottir seem to switch the familiar balance between animals and humans: the animals do the
things that humans normally do, and we are just spectators. In this way, our “cultivated” life is emphasized in a
clash with nature: our behavior is full of absurdities and routine activities, and the animals make that behavior
clear: they protect themselves with aprons, umbrellas and rubber gloves while smoking, drinking, and talking
on the phone. Adalsteinsdottir does not use unnecessary sweetness either, but the situations appear as both a
state of things, and absurd and surreal.

It is as if the two artists distort and twist their images to articulate the relationship between nature and culture. Thus, Thordis
Adalsteinsdottir’s colorful drawings and Svend-Allan Sørensen’s black and white woodcuts combined offer us concrete-absurd
images of a crazy contemporary.