Most of the oeuvre of Sine Hansen (1942 - 2009) dates from between 1964 and 1980. In a peculiar mixture of references of Pop Art, Op-Art and Hard Edge Painting, works by the artist, who was born in Poland, often depict mass-produced objects from everyday life. However, rather than underscoring the commodified nature of the objects shown, the artist instead presents them in isolation, as flat, pared-down images on intense monochrome backgrounds. The artist, whose initially successful career slowed and eventually stalled in the late nineteen-seventies when she married and started a family, was particularly keen on painting everyday objects: light bulbs, tools or safety pins – objects traditionally imbued with gender-specific connotations and therefore also demand a sexually connoted reading.

“Traits of my production can be found in the controllability of aggressiveness,” Hansen once commented; a restrained, suppressed tension and hardness does indeed seem to bubble up beneath the Pop surface in many of her works. For example, Beglühte Sicherheit, an early painting from 1965, shortly after Hansen completed her studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig (Braunschweig University of Art (HBK)), shows two oversized safety pins which are interlocked with each other. The sharp tip on one pierces the other’s ring-shaped end of the other. Above them, light bulbs are lined up in a row, set against a background in a contrasting color. Like floodlights in a stadium or spotlights on a stage, they seem to “illuminate” the surreal scene.