Artist : Kristoffer Axén
Title : Fireflies
Medium : oil on canvas
Dimensions : 50 x 60 cm  | 19.7 x 23.6 in



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Kristoffer Axén's atmospheric paintings and works on paper are often self-biographical as a means of tapping into the wider human condition. Works revolve around themes including the utopia of childhood, the temporary, dreamlike, quality of reality and the unconscious search for something oblique or unspecified. A sense of nostalgia is often tinged with an overarching feeling of the melancholy of transience. Inspired by cinematic imagery, anonymous photographs from the internet and childhood snapshots, Axén’s paintings and drawings are often bordering the dreamstate and the inner world. While contemporary and historic references include Michael Borremans, Mamma Andersson, Vilhelm Hammershoi and Richard Diebenkorn, his use of textured mechanical pencil for the drawings and the juxtaposed realism with the simplified blocks in his paintings are uniquely his own.

Kristoffer Axén was born 1984 in Stockholm, Sweden where his still resides. He is a self-taught painter, who studied fine-art photography at the International Center of Photography in New York between 2008-2009, a city in which he lived and worked in until 2013. Axén’s work have been exhibited internationally in solo shows in New York, Copenhagen, Stockholm and in numerous group shows around the world, notably at Liljevalchs Spring Show in Stockholm, at Aperture Gallery in New York and at Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. Axén, is part of many private and public collections such as the ICP collection, Michaelis School of Fine Arts and MONA and he has been published in articles and selections from magazines such as Zoom Magazine, The New York Times and Vogue Italia. .

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