Trude Viken at Enter Art Fair, Copenhagen: Trude Viken

The Norwegian artist Trude Viken (b. 1969) is a ‘colourist’ without restrictions. Her paintings are saturated with swirls of flesh tones, ashy greys and witchy greens combined with bright red, orange, yellow, and luminous pinks. The smell of oil paint lingers on, and colour tones, both the earthly and the unnatural, stir eroticism and repulsion. Viken’s works require that viewers fathom their physicality – a terrain of oil paint. In this way, they are landscapes of weather systems that are as unpredictable as moods. A face becomes a hairy green mass with a bubble-gum pink base; white strokes are like the edges of clouds or wings. Her portraits from everyday life develop into fantasies expressing our interior lives and our mostpalpable feelings.

Review in Artforum (Fortnight institute)

NRK (Documentary Trude Viken og Edvard Munch)