Painting for me is a primal action that at moments lifts me into a state of trance. It is both meditative and physical. The act of painting enables me to enter a suspended state: I forget myself…even the passage of time.
It is at once personal, intimate, and universal. A painting speaks of its creator, naturally. At the same time, it has the potential to connect the viewer with their secret inner self.

I like to incorporate loved objects and motifs in my work: paintings of artists who inspire me, old prints and photos, travel memorabilia, botanical elements, and animals. I like to harmonize the eclectic. I design my own ceramics and enjoy arranging them in the home space of my canvases, where they become observers of authentic existence. For me, these familiar everyday objects fuse art and life.

The meticulously arranged home elements in my paintings speak to the Scandinavian love for interior design. Another source of design inspiration is the amazing creative process at Hermès, where I have had the privilege of working seasonally for a number of years.

Home elements are the ideal starting point for laying down blocks of colour that interlock on the canvas like pieces of a puzzle. Working in this way, I obtain volume and depth in the composition, and I can play with the notion of sculpture in two dimensions.

In 2014, Holdgaard participated in an exhibition at the Ingres Museum in the South of France (Montauban) organized by the Louvre. The exhibition brought together the countless disciples of Ingres such as Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Gauguin, Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon, and David Hockney among others and current young creators - Gaël Davrinche, Emilie Benoist, Kathleen Gilie, Orlan, MisTic, as well as others.
« … as promising as the Danish painter, Christina Holdgaard, who seized a glory of the Louvre,… »
Le Figaro

« Contemporary art is not always disembodied, conceptual or abstract. It can convey a family resemblance. And by its frontal and virtuoso approach, divulge the enigma of personhood. Born in 1974 in Jutland, Christina Holdgaard received her Master’s Degree in Danish 19th-century art history at the Michelet Institute (Sorbonne Paris IV). The painter, characterized by a certain Scandinavian rigour, took part last year in the exhibition “Ingres and the Moderns” held at the Ingres Museum in Montauban, where she received laurels at the Louvre for a portrait inspired by Ingres’ painting, Monsieur Bertin. Puzzle Paintings is her second solo exhibition in Paris ».
Le Figaro

« If the portraits that Holdgaard delivers consist at first sight of refined and seductive images, her vision finally disconcerts more than it flatters, always limning a likeness from an unexpected place, unanticipated by the subject himself. The fact that she captures and translates this part of ourselves, a stranger, who nevertheless often resumes who we are better than anything else, marks her as a true portraitist, one who, in addition to accounting for our features, informs us about who we are ».
Dimitri Salmon, curator at the Louvre Museum, exhibition catalogue

« The style developed by the artist, between photo-realistic and pop, employs a digital process: Each portrait begins with a computer sketch based on photographs she has taken of her subject ».
Dimitri Salmon, curator at the Louvre Museum, exhibition catalogue

Christina Holdgaard received her MA in Art History at Sorbonne, Paris IV University, in Paris, France. Followed by her multiple years of training at Paris- Italy the Academy of Art in Paris and Atelia Corlin in Paris, and The School of Art in Rander, Denmark.

She had various solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Paris and Montauban, France, Denmark, London, New York City, Miami, Israel, Lisbon and more.

Christina Holdgaard's paintings are to be found in numerous private collections in France, the United States, Denmark, and Switzerland.

Christina Holdgaard is from Randers, Denmark and currently lives and works outside of Paris, in Samois-sur-Seine.