Artists

Ditte Ejlerskov

Press release

Text: Ditte Ejlerskov Forest Mirror takes place within New Gynæa, a jungle-like pictorial world I have returned to for many years across several works. It is not intended as a landscape or a representation of nature. Instead, I see it as a visual system in which forms are copied, reflected and altered. The paintings behave almost like versions of the same file: recognisable, but never identical. At the centre of the exhibition is The Final Bow. A figure bends forward in a gesture that can suggest submission, performance, exhaustion or transition. The figure returns throughout the exhibition in mirrored and displaced configurations. In some paintings, one work appears to answer another. Yet the repetition is never exact. Colours shift, forms slip out of alignment and details emerge or disappear. These deviations are important to me. They interrupt the symmetry and make the image feel unstable, as though it has been processed, duplicated or incorrectly rendered. This digital logic exists alongside the organic language of the jungle. In the final stage of a painting, I use a Posca pen to trace selected forms. The line allows me to return to marks that were made quickly and without a fixed intention. By outlining them, I assign them a function. A dot becomes an eye, a stain becomes a leaf, an uncertain shape becomes part of a body. The outline does not simply clarify what is already there. It changes the status of the image. Something provisional is made definite, even when that certainty is artificial. For me, this process resembles memory. We return to experiences that were incomplete or ambiguous and redraw them until they appear coherent. Each repetition fixes the image more firmly, while also moving it further away from what originally occurred. New Gynæan Island 4, 2026, Vinyl paint and tempera on canvas, 150 x 170 cm Ditte Ejlerskov, born in 1982 in Frederikshavn, Denmark, lives and works in Skælskør, Denmark. She studied at The Funen Art Academy, Odense, Denmark, and Cooper Union School of Art, New York, USA, and received her MFA from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. Her work has been exhibited at museums and art institutions in Denmark, Sweden, and internationally. In Denmark, selected exhibitions include ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj; Vendsyssel Kunstmuseum; Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg; Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; and Aarhus Kunstbygning, Aarhus. In Sweden, she has exhibited at Malmö Konsthall; Malmö Art Museum; Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg; Kristianstad Konsthall; Uppsala Art Museum; Ystad Art Museum; Skissernas Museum, Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art, Lund; and the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, among others. Her international exhibitions include presentations in Kristiansand Kunsthall, Norway; Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway; KUBE, Ålesund, Norway; Galleri Nord-Norge, Harstad, Norway; MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; Cneai, Chatou, France; and CCA Andratx – Centre of Contemporary Art, Andratx, Spain. Her work is held in numerous institutional and private collections in Denmark, Sweden, and internationally.