Kristian Evju (1980), a Norwegian by birth, won the prestigious Debutante Award at The National Annual Exhibition of the Visual Arts months after graduating from Edinburgh College of Art with a 1st class honour and the Andrew Grant Bequest for academic merit. While still at college, he won several competitions and was chosen to represent the college with his drawings in collaboration with Prince’s Drawing School. Since then he has won four new awards, appeard on national Norwegian radio several times, and exhibited in both Norway and the UK.

Evju presently lives and works in Edinburgh.

“I am fascinated by the unique way we consciously or subconsciously filter and gather visual material on a daily basis. My drawings and paintings serve as meticulous documentation of  this intuitive filtering on a personal level.  At the moment I am trying to investigate what I feel are unique emotional atmospheres between the subjects in my work - the layers of feelings projected or absorbed by individuals that make up something almost palpable in the space between them. 

I want my work to reflect unmistakable qualities from the photographic source-material, but at the same time I  strive to protect the qualities of  the materials I work with - graphite and paint.

I find the juxtaposition between the immediate, quite random photographic source-material and the meticulous, technically challenging process leading up to the final work both interesting and important. I leave unmistakably unique and individual marks in the reconstruction or recycling of the source material, but my labour is  without significance to the immediate interpretation.”