Claus Carstensen was born in Sønderborg in 1957. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (1977–1983), simultaneously reading comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen (1979–1983) and participating in the Copenhagen Circle for Semiotics (1981–1983). Later, he would become a teacher in the institution where he studied art, from 1993 to 2002.
Poetry was Carstensen’s first means of artistic expression. Already at secondary school, the Danish artist would write poems, collect them into volumes and sell them in between classes to his schoolmates, as he did with his first opus Flieger sind Sieger/Helte (1975). Since then, Carstensen has published 15 collections of poems, five essays and four anthologies, proving that his love for writing has never subsided.
Artistically, Carstensen erupted onto the contemporary Danish scene among De Unge Vilde (The Young Wild Ones), a loose group of young creatives who rejected the dominance of conceptual practices by re-embracing the medium of painting. This German-inspired stylistic and procedural positioning introduced itself via the Kniven på hovedet (The Knife on the Head) exhibition of 1982. Image distortion via photocopying, enhancements and other – sometimes arbitrary – manipulations were the stock-in-trade of this generation’s subjective expressive efforts. Carstensen’s production to this day embodies the punkish nihilistic take on two-dimensional work, an effect he achieves through superimposing planes and the simulated accumulation and weathering of posters and other promotional urban imagery.
Coming from such a bold generation and boasting a unique artistic style, Carstensen rapidly made a name for himself. He represented Denmark at the Sydney Biennale in 1992, the Sao Paolo Biennale in 1994 and the Venice Biennale in 1997, and was the recipient of the Eckersberg Medal in 2004.
His curatorial project Shibboleth began in 2010 and concluded in 2015. The initiative consisted in the creation of 76 distinct exhibitions in Carstensen’s workshop (using his and other artists’ works) accessible by appointment only. Sections of the project were transferred to Esbjerg Art Museum’s permanent collection in 2015. Two years later, an exhaustive catalogue of over 500 pages documenting all 76 exhibitions was published by the museum.
In 2015, he enjoyed a major retrospective show and accompanying monograph, What’s Left (Is Republican Paint) – Nine Sisters, at the Aarhus Art Museum.
In 2016, a major site-specific commission of five life-size bronze figures, Doing Time/Critical Mass, was installed at the Storstrøm Fængsel high-security prison.
Carstensen lives and works in Copenhagen.
