"Thematically, the work speaks to my interest in the positions of the 'Modern Man' and masculinity in our culture and how they can be represented through painting."
Martinussen's 'Thinking Men' series engages with the historical lineage of the figure in art, invoking references from classical antiquity to Rodin's sculptural idiom, while interrogating contemporary constructions of masculinity. The majority of the sculptural sources that inform Martinussen's formal vocabulary historical works by Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth were conceived as female bodies or feminized abstractions. By appropriating their compositional strategies and applying them to male subjects, Martinussen inverts an art-historical tradition, producing a "sculptural masculinity" that is both monumental and vulnerable. His paintings, with their visible brushwork and exposed underlayers, emphasize process as a metaphor for interiority, registering the act of thought as an embodied state.
Martinussen combines watercolours, acrylic paint and oil pastels to create his expressive style of portrait works. Inspired by everything from ancient Greek art to modern popular culture, he depicts male figures in different positions of reflection and thought. His main body of work is tied in an ongoing series, called 'Thinking Men', which considers male identities and representations of today. Both simple and sculptural, masculine and feminine, vulnerable and resilient, the Thinking Men invite one to engage and question; what is going inside the minds of these men? Martinussen has been working on the Thinking Men series since 2020 and his work has been exhibited in various group shows in Copenhagen.