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“I work with loneliness because it’s an existential question, and it's a fundamental condition. It’s important that someone besides the church deals with it.” 

Six months before meeting Anette in person, I visited her solo exhibition The Trees Exist at The Nivaagaard Collection, on a Saturday afternoon in June 2021. Founded in 1908 as an independent institution, Nivaagaard has become one of Denmark’s most distinctive art museums, known both for its Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces and for celebrating contemporary voices. There, Anette was introduced as “one of the most talented and renowned painters of our time.”

The Trees Exist brought together works from over thirty years of Anette’s practice, developed on the occasion of her 60th Birthday. Best known for her intimate, colorful, emotionally charged interiors — spaces heightened with anticipation, as if holding their breath — Anette made a bold departure, as if to say: look outside. After decades of keeping her audience’s gaze within the four walls of her constructed realities, The Trees Exist begins to step beyond the predictable safety of the domestic into the unpredictable presence of the natural world. In doing so, she’s invited her viewers to cross that border with her, asking: will you trust me, will you stay with me, as I enter this new chapter? The question lingers - not only about her evolving work, but about whether we, too, are willing to accompany her into what lies ahead.

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Born in 1961 in a small village outside Kolding, Denmark, Anette Harboe Flensburg grew up far from the world of art. Her parents, both from the countryside and still in their early 20s (when they had Anette and her older brother) built up a gasoline business from scratch, working tirelessly to create a safe and stable home. Art and culture were not part of family life — there were no museum visits, no discussions of painting or music, they were not aware of this world — but Anette from an early age liked to draw. Whether using found objects in nature or the home, from paper, dirt, plants, shells, stones, crayons, buttons, Anette had always been compelled to construct images as a young girl. 

Between 1981 - 1986 , Anette attended Kolding School of Design, studying a course called Drawing in Graphics which was a natural step. The school was close to home, and became her first formal space to develop her skills. That said, it took time for her to engage deeply with art history and to locate herself — both in the lineage of the past and in the possibilities of the future.

Four years later when graduating, she realised her ambitions extended beyond design, and she needed a studio in Copenhagen to stretch out, both her mind and her work. At this point she had created only a handful of paintings — “free art” Anette called it, “made without concern for sales or audience, driven purely by a fascination of making something personal and discovering my identity as an artist." At design school, the emphasis was on communication — creating work that told a story or sold a product — but Anette gravitated toward projects that were more original and exploratory, without a grand agenda. Over time, painting became her true focus, especially oil, a medium that allowed deliberate work, letting her shift and move for hours after the paint was first laid down.

“Oil is a medium that allows you to move slowly, and that is what I needed, more time.”

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“I can be very critical about the need to ‘communicate’ something when it comes to the foundations of design school, but it is where I learnt how to communicate my own personal thoughts and ideas to the world. I come from an environment and a background where my parents were very nice, and good people and so on, but of course, I felt very different from them — I didn’t want to go that way. I was very critical about their lifestyle, about their politics and what was going on in society, and I had a lot of urgency to express this.”

In 1986, Anette moved to Copenhagen, “I came because I was following a dream, believing that with time, space, and good paintings, success would follow… It’s not that way though,” she recalls. “It got really difficult — you need a network, and a clear understanding of what art means to people around you.” During this period where “competition was so tough” she persevered, slowly building-up a community, finding a studio, and entering shows. “In the 90s, Copenhagen was full of people who wanted to be artists, in a way it still is, and you have to work incredibly hard to be one of the few who can manage it all at once. Thankfully, I have discipline — I’m not the type to go months without working. I always like to be working, to be in my studio.”

Between 1994 - 1996, Anette returned to school, enrolling at the University of Copenhagen to study philosophy. Her days settled into a steady rhythm of wandering museums, losing herself in lectures, and lingering in long conversations with fellow students. “I kept reaching for twentieth-century philosophers,” she tells me, “the ones who wove art and film into their arguments — Heidegger, Deleuze, Barthes — reading their words closely and debating their intent.” She was constantly testing their ideas against her own growing sense of the world. “Input mattered as much as anything I created,” she recalls. “Those philosophers seemed to follow me everywhere.”

These readings also helped her analyze her own situation — to understand her position and what she was trying to do within a larger historical context.

“The way these philosophers think and write about existential questions makes me feel at home in their conversations, far more than from a psychological standpoint.”

Entering the late 90s, Anette found herself experimenting more than ever before. “I was interested in finding a concept, something to hold down my work.” Some of these paintings are at her brother’s house, works she’d like to “Burn to the ground” given half the chance. “Looking back is quite tough, but it’s also touching. I can clearly see works from a young artist who is searching — searching for a place for me to be.” Although “very expressive and heavy in content” she says, “It’s clear that there’s a desperation towards finding this expression” and even now finds them “hard to see” because she’s not just looking at work she doesn’t connect with, “I’m met with a younger version of myself that is quite frayed, and unmoored.”Anette explains that her early attempts were a way to “clear out” certain ideas, which helped her develop a stronger relationship with composition, color, and space — elements she felt had been distracting from the narrative content.

After a period at Art Omi in 2001, an arts center situated on 120-acres in New York's Hudson Valley, Anette became attracted to America’s pop-art and photorealism. “The exchange among artists at Omi communicated things very clearly, and the criticism we received as residents was deeply impactful. Today, with so much happening online, the subtlety of criticism has become diluted, and social media engagement or comments carry far less weight for me.”

Community and criticism is important to Anette, but she prefers this medium to be in-person. How things have mutated across “online worlds” she finds more distracting than beneficial. When I ask her about her feelings of sharing work on social media, her quick response “Enjoy it? Not really… Now and then it’s a little funny, but most of the time I think it’s a little stressful… ‘Ohh they liked it, ohh they didn’t like it… are they trying to say something to me… that person didn’t like it… but did they even see it…” All of this feels like an “antiseptic” on her intuition she describes it as.

When not painting, Anette will be reading, and so too will her husband Bjørn Poulsen, also an artist. If not in their respective studios, more often than not they’ll be found sitting “In the garden if weather allows” — together or apart — reading. “Reading has had an enormous effect on my work, and without the time I’ve had to be able to read as much as I do, my work wouldn’t come close to where I’ve managed to push it.”

Her 2020 show, In Company with No One, is a title that stems from Samuel Beckett’s book Company, one that Anette has returned to many times. “I have found it interesting for many years,” she says in an interview with Trapholt Kunstmuseum where the show was exhibited, “It’s about a boy who is lonely and primarily feels misunderstood. He has many questions of an abstract nature, such as ‘How far away is that cloud?’ Every time he feels dismissed, he feels the urge to share ideas with someone, so he invents voices. He lies in the dark and invents voices he would like to talk to. In reality he has a conversation with himself, but the voices create a space around him. A room without contours.”

This idea of shaping the abstract through quiet introspection, self discovery and internal dialogue has always been a means for Anette to find, grasp and hold what she is searching for. Ideas usually come to her in silence and alone — she is rarely inspired when surrounded by people, overstimulated by input.

“It took me a long time to know how to express myself”

Anette remembers. “But with time I have become more aware of how to look at things, and why I began placing a model between myself and the landscape. I see now it was a way to use it as a lens, to watch what might emerge. In daylight a model casts shifting figures of light and reflections — five minutes later it looks different. I like making situations that can reveal change, and with time, being present to what shows up. 

Anette works from a constructed reality, through small-scale scenography and staging. Drawn to domestic environments, she constructs rooms, not unlike an architectural model, as if designing spaces in anticipation of a new life.

The model-making began in 2001 at age 40, when Anette came across a doll's house in her basement. A familiar, home-like structure, suddenly dwarfed by her presence. Picking it up, she walked it up to her studio floor, popped open the roof, and unveiled the familiar scene. An open space, with vacant rooms, resembling a home ready to purchase. Unlike the cosy atmosphere of a traditional doll’s house, aside from a few tiny, toppled over chairs, this one was left empty. In this moment, a sense of possibility suddenly flooded back to her. “Although familiar in its domestic nature, there was a psychological atmosphere” which only intensified when she peered through a side window, not unlike a giant in a fable, her eyeballs filling the entire window frame. "There was a suspense in the space" the question of 'coming or going' heightening the mood… and if I was patient enough, something could happen.”

“I am not trying to say there was God in that moment, not at all, but there was an atmosphere that was showing up, one that was shifting, purely through the changes in weather, through light, temperature… Being open in the moment that something shows up is important. Waiting and watching, in itself, is an act that asks the world, 'What is this? What is life? What is death? What is existence? What is anything?'”

Returning to the idea of “The Church,” Anette later reflects: "Christianity, its construction, and deconstruction into modernism has constricted philosophy and religion.” Though not religious, she admits a fascination with sacred spaces: in southern Europe, “Some of the greatest art still lives in churches — Caravaggio, Piero della Francesca… You step inside, and the atmosphere silences you, you turn inward. Maybe I’m more religious than I let myself believe.” For her, the institution of the church and the searching impulse of religion remain distinct: one rigid, the other open, restless, and alive with existential questions.

Among Anette’s most referenced thinkers is Jean-Luc Nancy, a French philosopher whose work explores community, the sacred, and the deconstruction of Christianity. He writes, “The sacred is indexed to an encounter or a point of intensity via which the subject approaches what cannot be grasped in itself, but only through the endless process of reaching towards it.” Anette’s reflections on sacred moments and spaces echo Nancy’s words, seeing them as less about rigid belief and more about an open, ongoing movement of inquiry and presence.

An excerpt from a book that Anette wrote, titled, We Live Inside One Another also speaks to this idea. “Someone said of these spaces, that they were the waiting room of death. But it’s not true, in these spaces everything that isn’t dead exists.’ This book in a way is about losing my father, it’s very personal… It's about working, and losing my father, and the moments in the day where he returns to me.”

Anette’s father died in 2003, being very close to him, this was an incredibly challenging time. “Losing a parent is very hard and is a reminder of how important it is to find the family you choose — to surround yourself with people who you can always talk to, who feel like home, the ones you have chosen for yourself.” Anette continues, “There are many people who in their everyday lives feel lonely. How much do we really talk to each other? How often do we delve under the surface? This is where art can do something unique in my opinion. I think it’s important not to repress these things, but to confront these issues once in a while, and talk about them with ourselves and others.”

Anette’s house is a classic 1952, mid-century modern Danish home. Easily accessed by train from Humlebaek Station, the same stop you get off at to walk to the Louisiana Museum. “Bjørn and I are always in Louisiana, being a five-minute walk away, it’s not difficult to keep up with all their events and exhibitions.”

When asking her what it’s been like to be married to a fellow artist, she responds saying, “It’s never been something that was a conflict for me, as I have always had strong relationships. My friends and my boyfriends were always people who were making art. I am very good at being alone when I work. I can be alone for hours. That said, I’d feel completely lost if I didn’t have my friends and my husband at the end of the day.”

“My paintings are always hopeful in a way, open, but at the same time, have ripples of melancholy”

Anette met her husband Bjørn Poulsen on a high school summer trip in 1987, Bjørn was her teacher. Anette 26, Bjørn 28. “It’s a rough world, sometimes, and having this stability, the red-thread of a continual relationship, a person who’s there, witnessing your evolution… Of course we’ve had problems, now and then, but we know each other so well, we support each other, and we’re each other’s most trusted critics… our relationship has been very important, to us, and both our work.”

Impermanence isn’t just a philosophy humming beneath Anette’s work, it’s a state she honours. “My paintings are always hopeful in a way, open, but at the same time, have ripples of melancholy, loss, isolation and loneliness seeping in. My work has always been around those issues… “What is this? What is this?” Anette keeps saying. Interrogating her work as a means of keeping it at arms length. As long as the question remains unresolved, the potency of the scene, the ambiguity and tension is preserved. 

Her acceptance of how things begin, end, and must be started anew, again and again, is a current made visible through her entire body of work. “The fact that we will die alone is an awareness we live with” Anette shares at the end of the interview, and it brings up another line she wrote in her book, We Live Inside On Another… “On the other side live people. Their footsteps wear a border, thinner and thinner.”