“Woman in Red” is the title he’s set for the entire series, and this woman in red appears so daringly cropped and challengingly placed on the canvases that old Groucho would have enjoyed it.

Now, instead, a Master Jakel puppet dares to get close on some of the canvases. Even the otherwise peaceful fairy tale bear Paddington has been given an erotic overlay by the 68-year-old painter.

Steffen Kindt, a German by birth but residing in Denmark since 1973, started his career as a typographer, then as an advertising man. At the end of the 80s, he quit a stable job and worked freelance as an art director and illustrator. Concurrently, he began painting and had his first exhibitions.

Today, art largely monopolizes his creative life, but the advertising industry still heavily influences his expression. For example, Steffen Kindt’s interest in cropping is immediately understandable; indeed, daring crops are a recurring element in the paintings and graphics he exhibits in Brænderigården. In several of the images, he even goes so far as to let multiple sharply cropped motifs interact.

Female Curves And the woman in red? Well, it’s quite simple—women have nicer curves than men, as Steffen Kindt says. At the same time, the colors red and yellow dominate along with black. – This is also a remnant from my time in the advertising industry, he explains. Back when I started, it was often too expensive to print in four colors, so the task was to create something useful out of black and one, maybe two more colors.

This means for Steffen Kindt’s paintings that they evoke memories of pop art and notably a celebrity like Roy Lichtenstein. But precisely with the cropping and choice of colors, he creates his own expression – and in several canvases a very erotic expression.

He himself says that the images are not always expressions of conscious choices.

– At an exhibition, a young girl asked me: What is the purpose of your pictures? I was completely taken aback. Because I couldn’t answer that at all.