Trude Viken

'Portraits from everyday life are those that interest me the most. They have developed into fantasies of how we feel behind our facade. I want to express those feelings and they must be genuine. When I have bad days, I know that most people also have them. Those days, hours or minutes are part of our life. We keep smiling happily and seem untouched to those around us. In the end we only fool ourselves. The difficulty of showing those tough sides of life makes me curious. This gives me a desire to continue my project.' (Trude Viken)

Trude Viken has described her artistic career as an Instagram fairy tale. As a self-taught painter she has always had a complex about her lack of formal artistic training. Her nursing career and family life took all her time and energy. However, she had been interested in art from an early age and painted in her free time. For years she worked to find her own style, much inspired by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. In a series of portraits and self-portraits she explored the contradictions between the social-media generation’s inner life and outward appearance, or “how we feel behind the facade”. Her bold naïve neo-expressionist portraits are saturated with swirling thick layers of paint. Shapes dissolve as the layers of paint are repainted many times; almost anything is allowed. The portraits come across as grotesque, haunting, erotic, humorous - and totally fascinating.

Viken decided to set up an Instagram account dedicated only to her artwork. The account generated international interest and one of the first inquiries came from the artist Richard Prince. – 'Do you sell your paintings?' Viken thought that someone was joking with her and initially ignored the request. However, The New York based art gallery The Fortnite Institute had picked up her Instagram account and finally persuaded her to do a solo exhibition in New York in 2018. It was an instant success.

In a short time, Trude Viken has exhibited separately on several occasions including shows at M + B Gallery, Los Angeles and Vestfossen Art Laboratory, Oslo, as well as a solo at Belenius in 2022 and a solo show at Enter Art Fair, Copenhagen with Belenius. Group shows include the inaugural exhibition at the new Nasjonalmuseum in Oslo, 2022, and recently again at the Fortnight Institute, New York, 2023. Viken has also been featured in a solo documentary at NRK, the Norwegian National TV Broadcasting Corporation.