She has turned her back to you – like the figures in Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes. You see her neck and the cap. It is a very beautiful cap with a special, gold pattern. The young woman is placed in a dark room as in a Caravaggio painting. The image also visually recalls Dutch painting from the sixteenth century, particularly that of Vermeer. And yet you never doubt it is a contemporary photograph. The Danish artist, Trine Søndergaard, plays with a number of references in her work – especially those that belong to the tradition of painting – but she always also insists on the photographicness of the image, and as such, its representation of reality.

In her new series, Guldnakke (Golden Neck), she depicts a number of young women wearing gold-embroidered caps from the nineteenth century, the so-called ‘golden-necks’. The images refer to a tradition of portraiture – a series of busts against a dark background. But they are not quite ‘portraits’ since the viewer never gets to see the women’s faces. Rather, they are more akin to still life images, with their strong emphasis on the details of the caps. Or, maybe, it is a kind of anti-portraiture, in which the images’ objective qualities replace the subjectivity and empathy of traditional portraiture.

The same could be said of Søndergaard’s series, Strude (2007–2010), which must be considered a forerunner to Guldnakke. Not dissimilar, Strude depicts a series of women wearing traditional folk costume from the Danish island Fanø. The costumes include a hood that protects the face against hard weather and thus hides the women’s features completely. Describing this series Trine Søndergaard states, “I’m interested in what lies beyond the direct gaze […] My focus is the introversion and mental space that lies beyond the image.”

Nicolai Howalt’s series Endings certainly also depicts what lies beyond the image. The series of photographs is about death but in a very abstract sense. It consists of fourteen large-scale colour prints. What you see is beautiful; almost monochrome images of different, textured patterns. It is impossible to guess the source of these images. The title, Endings, provides a clue, but remains ambiguous, which is exactly the point. Only by reading the exhibition text do you discover that what you see are, in fact, ashes from cremated bodies. This knowledge clashes with your initial perception that the images are beautiful. It is a feeling close to what Edmund Burke, in 1756, described as one of the characteristics of the sublime: a painful, ambiguous emotion split between attraction and repulsion. But there is more to the story. Endings are representations of death beyond presentation. They are imaginative images that refer to the signifier in photography in a very unusual way since there is no obvious visual link between the final image and the photographed object. Rather, the subject matter seems to dissolve in an iconoclastic unknown. The concrete image is replaced by a mental one.

In this way, Endings is a continuation, albeit a radical one, of themes previously adopted by Howalt. In his Car Crash Studies (2009) for example, the subject matter is abstracted, however, the title anchors it. In Endings, the gap between index and sign is wider, leaving more room for the thoughtfulness of the beholder.

In addition to their individual works, Howalt and Søndergaard have also collaborated on several projects, the large-scale photo series How to Hunt (2010) being the most widely exhibited. Where How to Hunt and, to a certain extent, the series TreeZone (2009) and Dying Birds (2010), explores the relationship between painting and photography, their new series, Mega Fossil, is more about investigating an encyclopedic gaze; how a museological framework affects our perception of objects and things. Shown in The National Museum of Denmark, a series of black-and-white, large-scale silkscreen prints depicting close-up details of ‘Kongeegen’ (one of Denmark’s oldest oak trees) was juxtaposed with a small box containing a twig from that same tree. In this way, the tree was transformed into a series of fossils with which the artists seemed to create a parallel between the ’objective’, encyclopedic gaze of the museum and the objective representation associated with photography.

Trine Søndergaard and Nicolai Howalt belong to the generation of younger Danish photographers born in the 1970s who entered the art scene in the 1990s. Besides their importance within a Danish context, they are now gaining considerable international attention as photographic artists.