It has been almost ten years since Thomas Hylander first went to England after a brief stay at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. After countless worn-out paintbrushes and litres of paint, he returns to Denmark to present new work in his first Danish solo exhibition, SMALL FIRES. The show opens in the new gallery henningsen contemporary.

“Small Fires” is a potent but modest title. Fire is fire and impossible to measure. A forest fire or an open fireplace, the flames are connected as one family. This statement could summarize Hylanders romantic approach to the painting in his persistent belief in its power and relevance as a medium.

In his often small, bone-dry, and thoughtful work, we see a glimpse of what appears to be a known subject field. An overgrown ceramic sculpture, an and an animated branch, reminds us of the family tree. All these subjects have a touch of something familiar, but Hylanders approach gives them a hesitant form, halfway through a process of transformation.

Thomas Hylander joins the Nordic family of painters, who finds inspiration and subject material in a melancholic borderland between dreams and reality, defined by Danish painter Peter Brandes as “brain landscapes”

At the show, the paper cut installation, “Loevhang”, - a choir of voices in black and white, will be exhibited for the first time.


Andreas Henningsen