V1 Gallery

Loji Höskuldsson

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Loji Höskuldsson, Born 1987, Reykjavík, Iceland, lives and works in Reykjavík. Höskuldsson’s process is excruciating slow, days and months, stich by stich, small (20 x 25 cm) and large-scale (170 x 300 cm) compositions appear on burlap, giving him ample time to reflect on the subject matter at hand. This meditative creative process is embedded in the final work, encouraging an intuitive contemplative response from the viewer.

Slowing our cognitive response to the work and leaving space for a more tactile relationship and reading. It’s a form of story telling founded in a craft tradition, but harnessed to explore current issues. A kind of Dogme approach to making contemporary art.

Klara Lilja

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Klara Lilja is one way to be a woman and an artist, and it seems essential to see her life as the mould or pattern which creates the form and engenders the structures of life. Events in her life are not the example, but the abstraction – as with her behelits, starsuns, flowers, bodiless limbs- and bones – the constant array of unseen patterns.

What first seems like abstract biomorphic forms reveals, when more carefully examined, an organic genesis of imaginative beings, flora, and fauna. Rendered in mesmerizing glazes, developed by the artist herself, the colors on the sculptures seem to blossom; from the glaze, or are they radiating from inside of them?

That remains open. “The events that left their mark on me happened in days gone by, in my head”, Klara Lilja quotes one of her Symbolist heroes, the French painter Odilon Redon (1840-1916). Klara Lilja bestows her figures with an aura, and refers to the concealed inner world of the viewer. To bring out the magic in them, Klara Lilja gives each of her new-found species a proper name.

Klara Lilja lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. She graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2021. Her Instagram is a popular visual gallery where she engages with her 16K+ followers with humour and endless digressions about almost everything, while keeping her face anonymous.

Mischa Pavlovski Andresen

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Evolution is at the heart of the works by Mischa Pavlovski Andresen. Constant change, not for better or worse, but a constant flow of more or less predictable and unpredictable reactions and relations. The nature of nature; the cycle of creation, existence, death and rebirth, the mundane and the magical, the states of being we find ourselves navigating, with or without our consent. In Pavloski Andresen’s paintings you sense the music of change. Plants, flowers and fungi grow wild. You feel the dramatic shift of the seasons, the heavy pull of the moon, and the radiant energy of the sun.

In a moment in time, where many are preoccupied with achieving a kind of existential balance, Pavlovski Andresen offers space for just being. Acknowledging sorrows, joys, anxieties, restlessness, chaos, solitude, anger, longing, love and the myriad of human conditions that constantly arise. Being lost and found simultaneously. A transcendental journey without a set destination.

Emma Kohlmann

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During the past decade, Emma Kohlmann has developed a distinct visual universe, easily recognizable for its amorphous figures. Rendered in an evocative color scheme and framed in pyrographed cherry wood frames, her signature style has with the last series settled into an almost naïve, folksy symbolism.

The same hybrid figures appear in Kohlmann’s paintings again and again: bodies turn into candelabras, heads unfurl wings, a tailless cow acts as shelter, and women grow leaves as limbs. Strange in a way that only Kohlmann can do.

Rose Eken

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Well-known for her meticulous still life and everyday objects in paper clay, Rose Eken presents a refreshingly punk take on earthenware’s archaic function as vessels, carriers and emblems. Recently, a sublime darkness has fallen upon her habitually bright and playful visual universe.

Anton Funck

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Anton Funck (b. 1992, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. In his ever-evolving practice, Funck explores repetition and variation through various mediums and techniques including painting, collage, textiles and printmaking.

Troels Carlsen

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Over the last two decades, Troels Carlsen has developed a painting practice, in which canonical art historical subjects are transferred to otherworldly realms. Paintings beyond dreams with intentions too deliberate to be labeled Surrealist. His work incorporates nineteenth-century anatomical drawings into the world of his painting, resulting in visceral assemblages of hybrid figures.

Carlsen’s archival impulses which connect such seemingly disparate references spring from a nearly forensic interest in how images are made, and how our understanding of the world is constituted by images in a symbolic as well as a literal, bodily sense. Carlsen’s interest in image creation explores how we recognize- and idealize both ourselves and others with romantic introspection.

Thomas Øvlisen

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In the works by Thomas Øvlisen, the seagull - with its scavenging and noisy nature - is a recurring motif. It deserves as a symbol of freedom, yet also as a reminder against romanticizing the very thing. The banality of the seagull’s liberty is “going for hot dogs and herring alike”, as the artist puts it. Much like the industrial detritus and found objects Øvlisen often employs as materials, the seagull is not picky and makes use of what is discarded.

Indeed, it comes to stand for Øvlisen’s own artmaking process, as he renegotiates Modernist paradigms through a radical eclecticism of materials and ideas. In Øvlisen’s heterogeneous universe, everyday utopianism meets sober realism, which invites thought, play, and the free flight of the imagination.

Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen

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That hustle, that democratic dance, that parade which the works of Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen constituted the theater is affected by a gentle and slow metamorphosis. The boundary between the dynamic surfaces resulting from an initial disintegration of the drawing, followed by a fleeting coloring as well as an arbitrary and abstract reassembly and the most delicate line that caresses idyllic scenes, seems to become impalpable and silky. Everything is hinted at and at the same time full of its identity and the rhythm becomes cadenced and enthralling like that of a Bolero. The tree is yellow, burnt by its sun and its leaves are lost on the canvas as if the essence had already been given away by the stroke; the animal is spotted and amused; the woman is lying and vacillating—her breast harmonious; the flower kisses the cloud; the branch is the color of the sky; a child merges with a ball and crab.

The visual language is always tight, each element present in the works is in a perennial and tortuous dialectic with all the other elements in play. Each thing becomes the other, the hand becomes foot, red becomes yellow; and each fragment refers to the entire drawing, everything is linked, and everything is also left to be and to manifest itself for what it is

Oppen Samuelsen's aesthetic approach is very close to the concept of “otherness,” strongly defended by the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas for whom the relationship with the other—in this case Lévinas refers to the relationship between two subjectivities—can only be explained in terms of a communication that lets him be other, indeed it is in the magnificence of otherness that the mystery of life resides. What makes this conception interesting in Oppen Samuelsen's work is the extremity of this concept of otherness as it refers to all things, to all the ways in which being manifests itself.

- Domenico de Chirico, Milano April 2. 2021 (Translated from Italian to English by Vashti Ali)