Other historical facts also mitigated against an altogether self-congratulatory series of “heroic portraits.”  Denmark had, after all, shut its borders to German Jews during the 1930’s when they had desperately sought refuge from the Nazi state next door.  The national, self-aggrandizing story of rescue is complicated further by newly emerged historical evidence (also portrayed here) that it may have been the Nazi S.S. commander of the German occupation forces himself who tipped off the Danish underground to the impending roundup of Denmark’s Jews¾and that he may even have turned a blind eye to the rescue operation itself.  The formally articulated ambivalence in Karen Gunderson’s black-on-black “anti-heroic” portraits is not intended to refute Denmark’s reigning self-idealization as a perennial haven of refuge, but only to pierce the self-congratulatory side of any national story that blinds us to other, conflicting historical realities.  For the artist is aware that every national story necessarily occludes as much history as it recalls.

In Karen Gunderson’s vision, the heroism of King Boris III of Bulgaria, who prevented his country’s 50,000 Jews from being deported to the Nazi death camps, is similarly tinged with ambivalence.  For it was partly through his accommodation toward the Nazi’s that he accomplished the actual rescue of the country’s Jews.  Good and evil cleave together in this world, each defining the other, Gunderson’s portrait of King Boris III reflects the king’s mixed means toward a blessed end:  his eyes are shaded, even masked slightly, preventing us from peering very deeply into his motives; bedecked with medals of the normally self-aggrandizing kind, the king also remains curiously oblivious to these customary signs of honor.  His hat is part halo and part stiff military decorum, a mix of menacing and protective authority.

Only the two kings¾Christian of Denmark and Boris of Bulgaria¾are consecrated in paint here.  The other rescuers remain suspended in the “drawing stage” of charcoal, works in progress, now fixed only for the purpose of our viewing.  Charcoal is a kind of ash, of course, a medium created in fire and burning, which famously allows for shades of gray.  Like black-on-black paint, charcoal does not hide the artist’s hand so much as reveal it through its traces, movements, and fingered smudges.  Unlike black-on-black paint, the charcoal surface remains fragile, vulnerable to human touch, unfinished.