TRUDE VIKEN

Viken speaks of Edvard Munch as her first love. She used to draw a blue line between them: Munch, the icon of Norwegian art, a childless bachelor who lived the artist myth until his death; she, a caregiver who raised a family while watching her dream nearly slip away. Two painters whose lives could hardly be more distant. But this line has blurred over time. Today, Viken proudly calls herself an artist. Her paintings shape the new canon—and, just like Munch’s, dare to ‘scream’.

Viken’s artworks can feel unsettling, even grotesque, but there is something strangely appealing about them. Thick brushstrokes and dramatic colours draw us in, revealing what hides behind the façade of everyday life: anger, despair, disappointment, awkwardness. Emotions we are taught to suppress, yet all secretly share. She has been working for years to find her unique language. Her practice began with a series of self-portraits: one a day, at first faithful to appearance, then gradually distorted into fantasies of internal states. She became fascinated by grimaces, tics, half-smiles that betray more than they conceal. A woman with perfectly combed hair, saying “it’s all right” when it clearly is not. Icy blue eyes masking vulnerability. A mouth caked in makeup, still trying to seduce, even though it can no longer smile. A coquette, a wreck, an ill-tempered woman. A drained, fed-up one. All true, all tenderly hers. With time, Viken turned this gaze outwards. Her portraits expanded into an entire world of characters—children, animals, half-human hybrids, weird parenting creatures—that are never quite what they seem. Each a symbol: of someone who thinks too little of themselves, who lives like an animal, who attempts to dominate or nurture.

Viken paints intuitively, without sketching. She often works on several canvases at once. Her tools: oil colours and pencil. She tries to keep things as simple as possible, avoiding spending time on details and focusing instead on the juxtaposition of strokes and colours and their expressive tension. Is this perhaps too simple? Rather than appear menaced by this question, Viken has utterly and exemplary owned it. Her work is a radical lesson in painterly economy: she seems to have found the equation for translating subjectivity into form using the fewest possible gestures. A condition of rare eloquence. In painting, it is easy to go too far, to overdo, to over-explain. This is where Viken is amazing at: stopping in time, sensing when the picture is finished. She could paint a subject how it really looks, add something here and there, refine, adjust—in a loop. But she paints it exactly how it feels and ends up with the forever goal—an interesting painting, full of mysterious, touching visual excitement.

For Summer Play, Viken transports us to the coasts of Norway’s far north, where the summer sun shines twenty-four hours a day. The backgrounds of her works echo the palette of these summer skies: hues of pink, red and blue stretched into a state of endless wakefulness. ‘Summer drives you mad, you never want to go to sleep’, she says. ‘Worse, you have to slip behind trees and rocks for cover’. No hiding—not even in her paintings. Viken’s eyes are literally everywhere, we can also spot them floating across the canvases. They stand by all the small missteps and breakdowns which make us human. In the dulled faces, the bodies heavy with exhaustion, the sunken stares after sleepless nights, we meet ourselves.

In the painting that gives the exhibition its title, a lone woman walks along a beach, away from the still-raging nocturnal revelry. The pose, the composition and the surrounding landscape instantly recall Edvard Munch’s Separation (1896), the painting Viken’s mother once copied and hung above her bed, and which has accompanied her ever since. Perhaps, it is a quiet citation; perhaps, the most flattering self-portrait Trude has ever painted. Either way, the path turns toward the sun.