Leo Park
EDGE
11.04—18.05.25

Gallery Steinsland Berliner is proud to present a new exhibition by Swedish artist Leo Park titled EDGE. Following his debut in 2021, this exhibition marks the artist’s second solo show at the gallery. On view are a series of paintings that expand on the artist’s signature style while exploring new perspectives and expressions. For the first time, Park will also present sculptural work which translates his painterly language into three dimensions.

Park is known for his characteristically bold oil paintings wherein the human form is transmuted into abstract formations that occupy a space between corporeal and chimerical. His awareness of and fascination with art historical tropes and traditions manifest as both subtle and overt nods to art works, genres and ideas of the past. His continuous depiction of “the nude” being a long-standing example of this. Increasingly self-referential, Park’s work now carries elements across exhibition boundaries, effectively consolidating a distinct visual world uniquely his own.

In EDGE, the artist’s previously sun-soaked milieus have been replaced by jet-black backdrops that accentuate the stark edges of the rose-hued and fleshy figures inhabiting the space that now appears decidedly interior. The perspective is intimately zoomed in, revealing tangled and disjointed limbs arranged upon decadent white bedsheets. The use of chiaroscuro (strong contrasts between light and dark), commonly associated with baroque art combined with the tightly framed compositions imbues the works with a sense of theater.

The tattoo-like inscriptions that follow along the curves of the figures in both the paintings and sculptures have become a key feature of Park’s work. Appearing throughout EDGE as stark, cipher-like runes, they seem to solidify an internal language connected to Park’s visual world.The exhibition’s largest piece, a monumental five-meter-long painting titled Líf & Lífþrasir, is the third in a series of increasingly distorted iterations of a motif first introduced in his previous work, The Lovers (2023). Named after the couple prophesied in Norse mythology to repopulate the world following Ragnarök, the warped form of Líf & Lífþrasir recalls both Holbein’s anamorphic skull seen in The Ambassadors (1533) and the intentional glitches of digital art, bridging historical and contemporary practices.

Leo Park (b. 1980, SE) lives and works in Stockholm. Since his 2021 solo debut in Stockholm, he has participated in various international shows in London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, Cologne, Copenhagen, Shanghai, Mexico City and Taipei. He has shown in art fairs such as the Armory Show, NADA, Market Art Fair, CHART and ZonaMaco. Leo Park holds an MFA from Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design and has studied at The Swedish Royal Institute of Art.

 

Contact us at info@steinslandberliner.com to register your interest.