Sprüth Magers has announced the representation of Oliver Bak in cooperation with ADZ Gallery, Lisbon. The artist’s first solo show with the gallery, Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist, is currently on view at Sprüth Magers, Berlin.
Bak, a Danish painter of the early twenty-first century, is recognized for his introspective approach to painting, exploring the medium’s history and techniques. His work reflects a profound engagement with the act of painting itself, interrogating its materials, methods, and influences. His close reading of history, mythology, as well as avant-garde literature reveals a deep interest in the narratives of the past and their links to the times we live in. By exploring the layers of history and cultural memory and translating them into contemporary painting, Bak creates topographies of tactile and chromatic intrigue.
Oliver Bak (*1992) has become known for his historically inspired, vibrant painterly topographies, which stem from a deep engagement with the materials, procedures and influences of painting. His meticulous practice that foregrounds texture and an original use of color produces multilayered surfaces brimming with art historical and literary references. On Bak’s canvases, his aptitude for invocations of the medium’s history entwines with the themes, images and atmosphere of avant-garde poetry and myths of decadence and destruction. Interested in how the stories that have defined collective imagination develop, he delves into one particular narrative at a time, which provides the starting point for each of his bodies of work.
Bak’s textured surfaces evolve by applying thick coats of oil paint mixed with wax and reworking them in a prolonged process of addition and subtraction until his motifs flicker in degrees of opacity. Areas of his compositions reveal light layers of color diluted with turpentine, offering a view of forms lying beneath them that suggest we are dealing with remnants – ghostly figurations drifting in and out of vision. Most of Bak’s protagonists materialize between flowers, levitate and disappear into the ground of the painting or emerge from fields of pointillist flecks of color. Bak’s works oscillate between playful beauty and nebulous danger, addressing the tension between the visible and invisible and the eternal cycles of death and renewal. In his drawings, which are a vital part of his practice, Bak departs from his familiar method of adding and subtracting. Working on gray paper, he uses his fingers to smudge the graphite, creating depth in apparition-like images. Their subjects echo his works in paint, similarly incorporating natural imagery that navigates flourish and decay and explores inner existential conflict.
This natural pattern is represented especially well in Autumn tree (2024). A vivid exploration of color and imagination, it focuses on a lush tree that extends beyond the canvas borders and displays signs of decline as its leaves and bark become mottled. Shades of green shimmer through the browns, oranges and purples that have been reworked multiple times. Bak’s laborious technique results in a painting that makes time its business: the work decelerates the gaze and invites viewers to visualize the tall sycamore in all seasons – past and future.
The veil that separates the worlds, the real and the fictional, the living and the dead, is particularly thin in Bak’s paintings. In a synthesis of form and feeling, of reality and personal inner subjectivity, his layered works provide a space for contemplation, ultimately enabling the viewer to perceive the invisible.
About the artist
Oliver Bak was born in 1992 in Copenhagen and currently lives and works in Copenhagen. Recent solo exhibitions besides Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist include Caves in the Sky, Cassius & Co, London (2023) and Sick with Bloom, ADZ Gallery, Lisbon (2022). From December 2024 to May 2025, Bak will be part of the group exhibition The Flowers of Evil at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. A catalogue accompanying the artist’s exhibition at Sprüth Magers will be published on November 2.
