The Wind Blows Wherever It Pleases (2003-7), Anker Mortensen
Oil on canvas, 150 x 180 cm.
Vague and indeterminate characters float in a blue universe of energy, lightness and openness. The content is not quite gone with the wind, though, because the title is a fragment of a Bible verse: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8).
The quote is Jesus’ reply to a question about spiritual rebirth versus physical birth. This spiritual life is about freedom, joy and forgetting oneself, and that is what the artist has sought to depict in his images of spiritual winds. His winds are at times gale-force, at times a gentle breeze in his spiritualised portraits of Faroese weather.
Anker Mortensen
(1960)