10 Artists to Discover at Copenhagen’s CHART Art Fair
Copenhagen-based art fair CHART launched to great success last year, with a well curated list of Scandinavia’s best galleries. This boutique fair is the right size to enjoy oneself without feeling overwhelmed and is a great place to discover emerging northern European artists, as well as some worthy imports from further afield. Here are ten to check out.
Peter Linde Busk at Bo Bjerggaard
This wild, figurative painter has been floating around for a few years with his refreshingly visceral approach to scrawled figures. Originally from Copenhagen, based in Berlin, and trained at Hunter College, The Slade School of Fine Art, and Royal College of Art, his work is increasingly abstract but with a delightful hint of a foot or eye amongst the chaos.
Alexander Tovborg at Nicolai Wallner
This young Danish artist, also based between Copenhagen and Berlin, has an almost symbolist, neo-hippie approach, and includes elements of fabric and acrylic in his collage paintings and linen canvases. There is a touch of Paul Klee in his vibrant colours and stylised forms.
Showing at CHART with Icelandic gallery i8, Uriarte makes “office art,” transforming the materials of everyday office life like notepaper, Bic pen ink, and envelopes into wonderful conceptual works that have garnered him a solo show at New York’s Drawing Center.
Thomas Øvlisen at V1
Copenhagen’s edgy V1 Gallery is dipping its toes into abstraction with Øvlisen. His work ranges from dripping painted abstract sculptural blocks to long wood panel paintings with a layered, scratchy approach to texture and colour.
Helsinki’s Galerie Anhava is exhibiting this refreshing figurative painter whose fluid female characters resemble the midpoint between Marlene Dumas and Japanese KaiKai Kiki artists. Her best works are oil paintings of clustered round forms that recall strange brown barnacles.
This Finnish artist’s use of anonymous archival photography and text echoes Baldessari through the lens of an 19th century medical librarian. Her grainy, enlarged, and mostly monochrome pigment prints examine the construction and context of photography and facts.
Jeff Olsson at Magnus Karlsson
It is no surprise that this Swedish graphic artist has shown alongside artists like Klara Kristalova and Mamma Andersson in the past. His narrative, melancholic drawings in subtle grey tones are set in a fantastical, musical version of the woody Swedish landscape.
Expect acid colours from this Finnish artist, whose work includes eye-popping, blown-glass skulls and icy acrylic box paintings that challenge perception with their layered veins of vibrant yellows, neon blues, and pinks—a series he titled “Oily Flowers.”
This Berliner completely sums up the DIY, plastic, internet-pop aesthetic that has emerged in the city in recent years. Expect an assemblage of factory-produced everyday objects, found imagery, mobile phones, and sportswear references.
Alex Da Corte at David Risley Gallery
New Yorker Da Corte is represented by one of Copenhagen’s best spaces—it couldn’t be hotter. He creates colourful multimedia paintings and installations using everything from horse hair to duct tape to plexi to stickers and other pop culture ephemera.
Images of Da Corte’s works featured at CHART will be coming soon.
