Post Modern Screen Print by the Danish artist Claus Handgaard Jørgensen

“Drengedrøm/talentløs” (“Boy dream / talentless”)
Claus Handgaard Jørgensen
Lithograph, 2006
Numbered 4/48, signed.
Artsize: 48 cm H x 48 cm W, unframed.

Claus Handgaard (1969-) is educated from the Royal Danish Art Academy's Graphic School (1990-98) after studying Art History at the University of Copenhagen (1989-90).

This piece comes from a series of 48 artworks made by four Danish artists, 12 each in a limited edition of 48.
The series is called “Heroes”. Heroes are made at the National Workshops for Arts and Crafts and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Graphic School. Heroes are supported by the Art Council's Visual Arts Committee.

With a kind of postmodern everyday realism, Claus Handgaard portrays contemporary motifs of pictorial art, and as a reflection of this, references to eg. comics, art history, advertising aesthetics on equal footing in his works. Motivic, he likes to take the lead in fictitious as well as actual urban spaces, where words and sentences are incorporated in the form of neon signs with messages that humorously contain considerations of creating or reading an image such as Big Expectations - This Picture Has No Hidden Meaning. In others, cliché-filled statements such as We All Lie and Unhappy and in love assume tragicomic dimensions that they blink between filling and emptying meaning. At one time addressed to everyone and nobody.

Through repetition of these and other punctualities, Handgaard draws attention to how life consists of trivialities that are so obvious that we do not give them a thought, but simply repeat them. A condition that he himself is subject to, as it is suggested in the works of sometimes autobiographical narrative tracks, which at the same time points out that both the sender and the recipient of a message are always themselves anchored in a subjective perspective on the world - and that this is where the nuances grow.

Claus Handgaard has a large number of exhibitions behind him, including at Charlottenborg, the National Museum, Kastrupgårdsamlingen, Danish Graphics House, Sønderjyllands Kunstmuseum, Vendsyssel Art Museum, Round Tower and abroad at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Graphics Museum Stiftung Schreiner in Bad Steben, Academia Romania in Bucharest, The Academy of Fine Art in Katowice and Kunstraum Kreuzberg in Berlin.
Of grants and prizes, Handgaard Jørgensen has received the National Arts Foundation's work grant, Henry Heerup's Grant, Ragnvald and Ida Blix's Fund, as well as the 2nd prize at the 7th Biennial of Graphic Art of the Baltic Sea States in Kaliningrad. His works are represented in the collections at the National Museum of Art, the Copper Engraving Collection, Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, the Skovgaard Museum, Vejle Art Museum and the Vendsyssel Art Museum. He is a member of the Artist Society and the artist association Corner (2014).