Knud Odde looks back in time when building his cabinet of images. He searches out pictures of people and situations which carry with them dreams and impressions from a recent past, and which have become, often without our noticing - elements of a contemporary mythology, moving through dark and secret paths, the pictorial art of our time, music and other expressions.

An important element within Knud Odde's pictorial world is his many years as a musician, as songwriter and bass guitarist in the leading Scandinavian rock group Sort Sol. The group represented the high points of the punk era, and has since pursued more conventional and classical types of rock, which also reflects a historical awareness. Historical connections are not only gained from rock-history - his texts may also use themes from modernist art and revolutionary architecture, such as Vladimir Tatlin's leaning tower, - the monument for the Third International.
Knud Odde also has a past as a research librarian, specialising in film history. He here had access to printed and photographed material from the early days of cinema, a definitive source for his own production of pictures.

Most of the themes within his pictures appear to be based on the media pictures of the 1950s and 1960s, of the heroes and fantasy scenes of the time. Primitive - but at the time revolutionary printing techniques using colour simplification and graphical tricks, renounced the realistic element, and with it the modesty of the psychological portrait.

The American culture of Hollywood, weekly magazines, comic strips and advertising became both the theme and the motif for the artists of the Pop Art movement of the 1960's. For the Andy Warhol generation it was both their own age and their cultural condition. A territory to be acknowledged whilst finding its own existential formula.
Knud Odde is not American. He approaches themes as a European, with both perspective and distance, but also with love. He stretches the notion of time - incorporating the present within the form of Merce Cunningham or Patti Smith, but also the Europeans of the 1920s into his repertoire.

A pictorial language emerges of an observant, ironic distance, and a unique intimacy, with warm and erotic overtones.

Per Hovdenakk, 1999