About Rikke Diemer


About Rikke Diemer

Rikke Diemer

Born in Copenhagen
Lives and works in Copenhagen


Education
1966-1975 The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen

Diemer began her career as a painter. Her early works from the late 1960s are paintings inspired by her professor at the academy, Richard Mortensen, one of Denmark’s most influential and innovative artists of abstract art.


Since the 1970s, photography has been central to her work. In the 1980s her photographic work introduced myths and iconography from the Inuit and Ancient Greece, often with motives of female classical sculptures, one consisting figure being the goddess Athena. Diemer often produces her motives in multiple editions and several different media with color variations. Playing with figure/ground relations and the interactions of color, Diemer presents the viewer an archetypal female image that reflects the changing perspectives of different historic perceptions of women, conveying a multitude of dynamic, visual sensations and encouraging us to think about how idealised images of the female body measures up against the figures of real, living women.

 

Rikke Diemer’s piece “Battle Dress” from 1999. Dresses are a recurring motif in Diemer's work, already present in her 1981 solo exhibition Athena, at Glyptoteket. Apart from her photographic and sculptural practice, Diemer’s contribution as an organiser has been important to the Danish art scene. She currently sits on the board of Astrid Noacks Atelier, was the initiator of a kindergarten at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1970 as well as a member of Kanonklubben (1968–1970)

 

Kanonklubben Artists: Lene and Marie Bille, Kirsten Dufour, Kirsten Justesen, Jytte Keller, Jytte Rex and Rikke Diemer 1970

Diemer was member of the legendary Kanonklubben (1968–1971, Denmark)
Kanonklubben got its name from the Canon Super 8 camera that was passed around among the students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where it began as an alternative class. Kanonklubben’s members made films about everyday life, using simple aesthetics. In addition to their individual works, the group created two larger projects in 1969 and 1970: The Garden (1969/1970), a project for a retirement home, and Damebilleder (1970), one of the first feminist exhibitions during the women’s movement in the 1970s to be organised exclusively by female artists.

Diemer has painstakingly crafted photographs by manipulating negatives and transferring motifs to other media using liquid photographic emulsion in rough strokes on concrete, lead and other textiles, creating images of actions, myths, and memories.

 

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 1981

Diemers work spans more than 40 years and explores life, dreams, myths, and memories of an association-based, non-narrative narrative structure. Her photos and collages are both heroically expansive and irreducibly straightforward.

See aviliable works by Rikkes Diemers in our shop

http://www.rikkediemer.dk

Fotoinstallation ”Transition” i tidligere Daell´s varehus, 2002
 ”Diamanten”, oktober 2004