Gerda Hansen — Artistic Practice and Conceptual Framework

Gerda Hansen’s recent paintings emerge from a visual dialogue with AI-generated imagery. Rather than using text prompts, Hansen works intuitively with generative systems, selecting, combining, and translating image fragments through an intuitive visual process. The resulting compositions often linger between recognition and ambiguity, where familiar forms appear slightly altered, unstable or difficult to fully identify.

At the core of the work is an interest in images that resist immediate readability. Hansen is drawn to earlier forms of image generation, where visual inconsistencies, distortions, and logical errors remain visible within the image itself. Instead of functioning as seamless representations, these generated forms exist in a fluctuating state between the believable and the artificial, activating the viewer’s impulse to search for meaning, resemblance or narrative.

The digitally generated material is translated into painting through a slow and physical process. While image generation takes place almost instantaneously, the act of painting introduces
duration, scale and decision-making. During this translation, images are not reproduced exactly, but altered through gesture, reinterpretation, and chance. Human error, shifts in direction, and painterly intervention interrupt the fixed logic of the digital source material.

Moving between algorithmic image production and painting, Hansen’s works explore how images transform when transferred from screen to surface. The resulting paintings remain open-ended, suspended between clarity and uncertainty, familiarity and ambiguity.

Gerda Hansen: Between Machine Vision and Human Perception

I am drawn to the ambiguity of AI-generated imagery, especially moments where the image almost makes sense, but not entirely. These visual inconsistencies create space for interpretation and imagination.

Although the source images are digitally generated, the painting process remains intuitive and physical. I begin from generated fragments, but the works often change direction while painting. I am interested in the space between machine-generated imagery and human interpretation – where images continue to shift, rather than settle into something fixed.

What interests me is also the contradiction between the speed of image generation and the slowness of painting. While digital images can appear almost instantly, the process of translating them into paint takes time and manual attention. In this series, some forms are intentionally left unfinished or suspended, referencing both the gradual emergence of instant photographs and the unstable, mid-generating state of AI imagery. Through painting, these fleeting digital impressions become slower, physical images that remain open rather than fully fixed.