NEWS
2026 - 2025
Solo show - Hinterlands
18 October - 22 November
Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London
PV 17 October, 6-8PM
HINTERLANDS
This solo show is the first with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, and will be held in the Tanner Street gallery in Bermondsey. Evju will be showing a new series of paintings and drawings from the Interior Landscapes project, which he has been working on since 2024.
Hinterlands: an area lying beyond what is visible or know.
“This project is based on archival material from early 20th century Viennese salons, ballrooms and gardens, forming my depiction of an imaginary Vienna around the time of Siegmund Freud: Rooms, gardens, people and objects. As the project has developed, the walls of the salons disappeared, and untamed, wild nature started appearing. The series of paintings titled Interior Landscapes are all inspired by the Norwegian painter August Cappelen’s 1852 Black Lake (Svarttjern), a painting that I have studied, disassembled and reimagined in various iterations as the backdrop of what I’ve come to think of as the theatre stage of my paintings. On this theatre stage, there are various props - be it people or sculptures, broken china, dolls, plants or debris. The people represented are not the main characters in the stories where they are featured. Some are amalgamations of various mugshots from American and Australian prison archives, some are based on scientists, entertainers or thinkers like Alma Mahler-Werfel, Hedy Lamarr, Sabina Speilrein. Mileva Mariç and others. And my own great, great grandfather, who I’ve never met. The project is a flight into the interior - the landscapes of fiction, and the mind - representing a place where the chaotic and destructive current issues can be transported and processed safely - true, but at the same time at a remove - and fictionalised, so that any cognitive dissonance is allowed, even encouraged. As the distrust in images and facts makes reality difficult to assemble, the parallel realm of fiction provides a safe space to keep the overspill of the unacceptable or unbelievable. Thus my paintings become historical fictions; gestalt paintings where everything is based on truth, but presented as fiction.”
For more information, and a full list of works, please visit the gallery website.
Nordic Noir
9 October 2025 - 22 March 2026
The British Museum, London
Curator Jennifer Ramkalawon at the British Museum has spent the last 5 years or more trawling the Nordic countries for works on paper. The result is an exhibition featuring over 150 works by 100 artists from the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden), Nordic noir opens with two important prints by Edvard Munch (1863–1944), arguably the most famous artist to emerge from the Nordic region and explores how the graphic arts continued to flourish and evolve after his death. It includes the charming prints of the Norwegian colour woodcut school of the 1940s; Danish prints tackling post-war angst and the threat of the Cold War; and political art from the 1970s in the form of vibrant screenprints by the Norwegian GRAS (Grass) group.
The contemporary Nordic artists represented here delve into the world of Norse myth, struggles with mental health and political issues such as feminism or the rights of the Indigenous Sámi people. The dominant theme for many, however, is nature and the vital urgency to preserve the fjords, mountains and forests unique to the region. One artist who has been extremely vocal on the subject is the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) who, last year, made an extraordinary watercolour especially for the exhibition using glacial meltwater to highlight the effects of global warming. Kristian Evju is represented by two pencil drawings from his 2023 project The Other.
The exhibition is a culmination of a five-year project supported by AKO Foundation to acquire graphic works on paper from the Nordic region. It will address the evocative power and haunting beauty of contemporary Nordic art, and how the region's artists continue to develop the legacy of Munch's emotional expressiveness and creative inventiveness.
Rolling, Action… Paint!
3 May - 21 September
Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway
Rolling, Action… Paint! is a group exhibition curated by Paul Carey-Kent and Jari Lager for the main exhibition in the summer program for Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium in Vestfossen, Norway. The gallery text:
Painting meets film in the main exhibition of the 2025 programme of Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Rolling, Action ... Paint! A number of artists are showing paintings alongside a film, so that the two inform each other.
These combinations operates in one of two ways. Around half will showcase films made by the painters. Viewers will be able to enjoy the paintings and films for their own separate qualities, while also getting a sense of how each informs the other.
The other half of the artists are presenting their paintings alongside films of the artist. Some of those films will be made by the artists themselves; some will be made by their work or life partners depicting their process; and some by filmmakers acknowledged in their own right. Those films will give an insight into the how and why of the paintings made by artists who aren’t themselves known as filmmakers.
The show as a whole provides an unusual opportunity to compare the languages of film and painting, building on their mutual influence in the 20th century to enable similarities and contrasts to be identified in the contemporary approaches of an international roster of artists.
Artists represented by paintings and films:
Johnny Abrahams with Liang-Jung Chen, Darren Almond, Catherine Anholt, Tilo Baumgärtel, Xavier Baxter, Bek Hyunjin, Quilla Constance, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Kristian Evju, Peter Matthews, Galina Munroe, Ørnulf Opdahl, Jen Orpin with Grace, Long Yung Yu, Matthew Stone, Emma Talbot, Liorah Tchiprout, Markus Vater, Ivana de Vivanco, Rose Wylie with Ben Rivers