SELECTED WORKS
2024 - 25
Interior Landscapes
2025
200 x 210 cm, oil on canvas
HINTERLANDS is a project based on archival material from early 20th-century Viennese salons, gardens, and ballrooms. Set in an imagined Vienna around the time of Freud, the works depict transitional spaces where interiors give way to wild landscapes.
Each painting incorporates elements from August Cappelen’s 1852 Svarttjern (Black Lake), reinterpreted as a recurring backdrop. Figures and objects—sculptures, broken ceramics, plants, and debris—are arranged like props on a stage.
The figures are composites drawn from historical sources, including mugshots, scientific portraits, and cultural figures such as Alma Mahler-Werfel, Hedy Lamarr, Sabina Spielrein, and Mileva Marić, as well as a family ancestor. The project explores the intersection of memory, fiction, and historical reconstruction, presenting imagined scenes grounded in archival reality
Hinterlands III & IV
2025
40.5 x 36 cm, pencil on paper
40.5 x 33 cm, pencil on paper
INTERIOR LANDSCAPES
In all my works, I use references from historical archives as building blocks or props. I think of it as very similar to writing historical fiction, or even genuine history books, as nearly all the elements are referring to historical facts, but the final piece is pure theatre. But it is still a way for me to process, slowly as I paint, the historical reality of the world around me.
Interior Landscapes III & II
2025
130 x 120 cm, oil on canvas
Hinterlands
2024
40.5 x 36 cm, pencil on paper
Interior Landscapes V
2025
130 x 120 cm, oil on canvas
“…A similar tension emerges in Evju’s drawings, rendered with such precision they appear photographic from a distance, yet closer inspection reveals subtle distortions – a woman with three arms, a figure with two heads – uncanny glitches that pull us into the digital age.”
Milly Walton, for Hinterlands at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery (2025)
Interior Landscapes IV
2025
130 x 120 cm, oil on canvas
The Well I & II
2025
(L) 40 x 32 cm, pencil on paper
(H) 33.5 x 26 cm, pencil on paper
The Garden project
2023-2024
‘The Garden II’ is from a series Evju calls ‘Freud’s Garden’. He says he is ‘trying to construct an archive depicting an imaginary Vienna based on the visual knowledge I possess - I have never been there - and a careful reconstruction using ChatGPT to generate iterations of words and prompts for various AI image generators’. That’s a nice touch, Evju never having been to Vienna, ensuring that the operation continues to be distanced from the inspiration. I’m reminded of how Bacon used images of Velasquez’s ‘Portrait of Pope Innocent X’, 1650, but never sought to see the painting itself. Evju then went on to use prompts like this: ‘Black and white vintage photo of a Viennese psychoanalyst standing with medicine bottle in lush, overgrown garden in Vienna...’
Paul-Carey-Kent, for Whispers, Oslo 2025
The Other Girl
2024
150 x 150 cm, oil on linen on wood
The Garden X, The Garden V, The Garden XI
2024
34.5 x 26 cm, pencil on paper