Nina Kleivan, born 1960, is educated at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Media Arts and Art Communication 1982-90 and has furthermore a minor in art history.

Her consciousness of art history is clearly reflected in her early paintings, where she works with the baroque form in particular. The pain common to mankind has for many years been a repeated motive in Nina Kleivan’s works in her search for the parting of the ways, which makes a human being evil or good respectively. Like when she in the photo series Potency (2000) dresses her ten-month-old baby as some of the world’s worst dictators in open and painful recognition of that about the infant you cannot know, what it holds, which qualities it will show later in life.

In her paintings Kleivan seeks to combine more layers, which kind of superimpose and thus create a space of simultaneity.
Parallel to her paintings Nina Kleivan has worked with manipulated photos in a very personal and narrative way and has also worked with video media, always focusing on the narrative. Here the picture’s at times somewhat disturbing narrative is frequently displaced in the physical surroundings through small set designs, which refer to the story line in the films.

Mai Misfeldt
Art historian and art critic at Berlingske Tidende