Susanne Nørregård Nielsen was born in 1970 in Svendborg, Denmark. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1998. She lives and works near Dundee and teaches in the Painting and Printmaking Department at Glasgow School of Art. Her work often takes the form of a visual dialogue with art history and in particular the early pioneers of geometric abstraction. She appropriates specific works and genres, playing with their relationship to colour and nature. She often animates her works by adding an element of her own movement, as with Suprematist Dress after Malevich (2004), in which she is photographed mid-air, while dressed in a Suprematist dress. She is especially interested in the interrelationship between abstract art, textiles and the body. This screenprint, Modern Lovers, was developed by the artist as part of her exhibition Red Yellow Blue at DCA in 2009.

In Modern Lovers we see an allegorical union of two leading figures of Modernism, Sonia Delaunay (well known for her experimentation with movement and colour) and Giacomo Balla (co-founder of the Futurist movement, whose works depict the dynamism and speed of the 20th century). Here the figures are characterised by the brightly coloured planes and layers of their costumes alone, each of which references the artists’ distinctive style. Through their figurative relationship and the multiple layers of the silk-screening process, Nielsen explores the interplay between colour, movement and substance.

The pattern of Delaunay’s dress in this print echoes the composition of Etude de Lumière (Prismes Electriques), 1913, a work by Delaunay in gouache and crayon in our collection (P.96-1962). Delaunay herself designed women’s fashions and fabrics, and we have a selection of original sketches, plus a portfolio of facsimiles. Some of the planes of colour in Balla’s costume here closely resemble abstract motifs in a suite of prints 'Progetti scenici per ‘sintesi futuriste’ 1915/1925 (Set Designs for Futurist Syntheses) in the Theatre Collections.