Wilson Saplana
Copenhagen
Wilson Saplana Gallery was founded in 2022 (as Gas9GAllery) in Copenhagen by gallerist and art advisor Christina Wilson and curator Nanna Saplana.
The gallery relocated to larger premises in the center of Copenhagen in 2023 and changed the name to Wilson Saplana Gallery. The exhibition program reflects a belief in experimental and uncompromising exhibitions - working with visionary artists in a wide field of practices and from different generations. The gallery also focuses on finding and establishing younger artists on the local scene as well as the international one. Wilson Saplana Gallery seeks to be a community as much as an art gallery, highly valuing the artistic conversation with a collaborative approach towards the multitude of agents in the world of art.
Featured artists
Maria Wæhrens
Maria Wæhrens’ (b.1976, DK) special ability for composition through balance and prioritizing of the image surface is surprising. She creates new imagery through her wild, abstract expressionism and precise coloring, that varies both in pace and distance. Sometimes suggestive figures appear and other times everything dissolves in quick brushstrokes. Screaming mouths and internal organs, as well as desperate and embracing hands take form between unruly proportions and compositions. The works are both present and grotesque and derive from an inner force and insistence from Wæhrens of exposing her emotional life onto the surface. The works can be perceived as a sensory precision of Wæhren's dreams that questions human complexity, imagination, and identity.
Maria Wæhrens received her MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 1999-2005 under Professor and artist Ursula Reuter Christiansen. Wæhrens have exhibited at Møstings Hus, Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, the Nivågaard Collection and Lviv National Art Gallery, Ukraine. Her works are part of the collection at The Museum of Religious Art, the Danish Arts Foundation, HEART - Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, SMK - The National Gallery of Denmark and The New Carlsberg Foundation. In 2021 she received the three year grant from the Danish Arts Council.
Maria Wæhrens, Portrait. Photo Caroline Bittencourt.
Maria Wæhrens, 'Korsfæstelsen / Crucifixion' (2023). Egg tempera and oil on canvas, 220 x 160 cm. Courtesy of the gallery and the artist
Maria Wæhrens, 'Kærlighed / Love' (2023). Egg tempera and oil on canvas, 170 x 155 cm. Courtesy of the gallery and the artist
