Martin Bigum is a Danish painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

, poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

, writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

, and video artist. Born in Copenhagen

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...

 in 1966. He is best known today for his paintings. During the 1980s he worked as comic artist for the Danish version of Mad Magazine.

Bigum's work is focused on uniting High Art and Low Art in comic-style paintings and video installations. Unlike former pop art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

ists such as Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

 and Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...

, his aim is not to show the emptiness of pop culture, but rather its fullness. His ambition is to create his own mythology through art.

Heartland, 1990–1991

Bigum's first exhibition Heartland showed a new artist, trying out different techniques, addressing questions to contemporary art. Still, the two paintings in comic art style First Sight 1 and First Sight 2 gave an impression of what he was about to become. Each of these two pictures presents a child thrown into a dream of colours, coping with this situation as well as they can. Maybe they are psychological self-portraits of the artist himself.