About

For more than four decades, Bjarne Werner Sørensen has developed an abstract practice spanning painting, printmaking, and site-responsive works.

He is a Danish–Faroese painter and printmaker based in Copenhagen.

Working primarily with abstraction, Sørensen’s paintings and graphic works explore rhythm, movement, and structural tension through gestural applications of colour and form. His practice unfolds across a wide chromatic range—from intense, vibrant colour fields to more restrained tonal compositions—where recurring organic forms and layered surfaces generate compositions that shift between improvisation and control.

Although often informed by observations of natural phenomena—such as water, vegetation, or microscopic structures—the works do not seek representation. Rather, natural systems function as points of departure for an abstract language concerned with movement, transformation, and the emergence of form.

Sørensen’s artistic perspective has been shaped by a life of geographical movement. Born in Denmark, he spent his childhood in Syria and Lebanon before returning to Denmark in 1966. Later, he spent extended periods in the Faroe Islands, where his mother was born, while also travelling widely in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

These experiences have contributed to an enduring awareness of shifting cultural and spatial contexts. The movement between rural and urban environments, and between peripheral and central locations, has become an underlying condition of his artistic practice rather than an explicit theme.

Residencies in Helsinki, Paris, Bergen, Berlin, Iceland, and New York have further informed his work. Sørensen has also maintained a long-standing engagement with the Faroese art scene, contributing as an exhibiting artist, organizer, and curator. His work with lithography has been closely connected to Steinprent, the graphic workshop in Tórshavn, where he has produced numerous prints over several decades.

He graduated from the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in 1985 and has since exhibited widely in Denmark and internationally. His work is represented in several public collections, including the National Gallery of Denmark and the New Carlsberg Foundation.