7 Minutes

Thorbjørn Sørensen launched his artistic career in the 1990s. He bases his works on photographs that he transfers to paintings. His paintings feature both abstract and figurative imagery.

In 7 minutes we see white smoke rings painted on a grey background, with a dark shadow perceptible to the left. The smoke rings have been realistically reproduced, and the picture seems near identical with a photograph. It seems as though the smoke is rising slowly upwards and that Sørensen has captured it just as it about to dissolve into nothingness. This ephemeral material is not a new element in art: in stilllifes and the vanitas motif, for example, a lit or extinguished candle symbolizes the transience of life and reminds us of the inexorability of death.

The German artist Gerhard Richter has greatly influenced an entire generation of painters in Europe and the United States. At a time when new media such as video and installation art seemed to sound the death knell for painting, Richter developed new methods of painterly representation, for example by painting on the basis of “imperfect” amateur photography.

Richter also painted a series of lit candles, an image he culled from the tradition of painting. As Sørensen notes in the title of this work, the symbolism of smoke has an inherently temporal aspect: it lasts for perhaps only a few minutes. In the grand scheme of things, a person’s life also only lasts a brief moment when compared with time eternal, so it is important to make the most of it.