Anne Vilsbøll (b. 1951) is a Danish visual artist and installation artist who specializes in handmade paper as her means of artistic expression. She is educated as an artist in Denmark, France and the United States. Today she lives and works alternately in Copenhagen, southern France and India.
Anne Vilsbøll's artistic practice has for 40 years been based on basic research into the hidden potential of handmaking paper as a modern form of artistic expression. She makes handmade paper based on traditional techniques from Europe and Asia. Vilsbøll has worked at several European and Asian paper mills, and she has published several books, articles and essays on handmade paper.
Anne Vilsbøll's oeuvre is the result of an intense, innovative and inspiring research on handmade paper. She is internationally recognized as one of the pioneers, who since the 1980s has been instrumental in reviving the old paper craft as a contemporary art form.
She creates sculptural artworks by processing the handmade paper. Vilsbøll works as an installation artist with paper with large-scale productions. Handmade paper art and materiality are a common thread in her oeuvre. Her paper work has an experimental quality, and is created in an ongoing research process on the materiality of wood pulp and finished handmade paper. She mainly paints abstract shapes on her own handmade paper, which gives the colors a rich, vibrating life. Her art is constantly changing and can change direction during the work process.
"I have tremendous freedom to choose, and I'm always exploring the world and its diversity. I will continue to do so as long as I can."
Her paintings, which are for sale in Art Gallery Linn, show intuition and sensibility. The colors are bright, clear and energetic and are mostly in abstract compositions. The paintings show her masterful ability to alternate between contrasts such as saturation-transparency, gloss-matte, light-dark, shade without dilution, dispersion and tactility.
Vilsbøll's motifs are taken from moments experienced. Her paintings, with abstractly constructed shapes and colors, are poetic expressions, which make the experienced into something important. The works speak of nature, life and coexistence. The paintings vibrate with pigments on textual surfaces, built from scratch by nature's plants to sheets, which absorb colour like skin – an interplay of material and painting, which has been Anne Vilsbøll's hallmark for four decades.
«Color is not only to be, it is to be savored, observed and collected but the pigment is also to be «touched» in my paintings».
Anne Vilsbøll has participated in many exhibitions at art museums and galleries in the USA and Europe. She is also a professor of French and art history. Vilsbøll is a visiting professor and guest lecturer at art colleges, design schools and art museums in several countries. She was co-founder of IAPMA, International Association of Paper Artists and Hand Papermakers in 1986, editor 1986-92 and president 1996-00.
Vilsbøll is inspired by, among others, Georgia O'Keeffe and Karen Blixen. She draws inspiration from historical legends, myths and philosophy.