Category archives: Artist Pages
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Sol Kjøk is a NYC-based visual artist who has lived and worked in six countries. She is also an art historian, multilingual writer and entrepreneur.
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Born in Norway, Sol Kjøk left her tiny mountain village at 16 years of age. She went on to live and study in Paris, Vienna, Medellín (Colombia), and a number of U.S. cities, earning three graduate degrees on her way.
Virtually self-taught in artistic techniques, she moved to New York City for an MFA in Painting at Parsons School of Design,and has since then lived and worked in an artist collective in Brooklyn.
An avid drawer all her life, Sol participated in her first professional exhibition as a teenager. To date, her work has been featured in 80+ group shows worldwide. She has had seven solo exhibits in museums, galleries and artist-run spaces in the US and Europe, most recently a multimedia show of some 50 pieces at Kunsthaus Tacheles in Berlin in 2009. This fall, her drawing was featured in a two-person show at Bill Hodges Gallery in Uptown Manhattan. Her work is represented in museums and other public collections in the US and Europe, incl. the Cincinnati Art Museum, OH, and the Nordic Museum of Drawing, Sweden.
Sol has participated in international artist residencies, taught at universities and art schools and lectured at museums and art centers. A recipient of some forty awards and artist’s grants over the past two decades, Sol’s work has been reviewed in many publications internationally.
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My figurative imagery is the visual terminus of a much longer method, and perhaps its extravisual meaning is to be found in the archeology of its making: Driven by a desire to first experience as manifest reality the symbolic content of my images, my process starts with performances staged in my studio, where my models and I make pitiful attempts at acrobatic exercises: We walk the tight rope (poorly), strenuously climb wires suspended from the ceiling, balance on balls and twist our bodies into a myriad of uncomfortable positions. It is important that this initial physical experience —ripe with the potential for injuries and skin-against-skin contact—lives on in the final pieces, as I strive to convey a bodily awareness of the paradox of strength and vulnerability that is the human condition.
In addition to works on paper ranging from a few inches to more than 13 foot in height, I use a variety of other media:
● Large-scale wall drawings executed on-site, which again can be read as an act of
● Performance/endurance art (during the process, I live on site 24/7, barely eating and sleeping)
● Larger-than-life scale works on canvas (experimental mixed media technique residing
in the borderland between drawing and painting)
● Installations: clusters of line drawings on contoured glass suspended from braids of human hair
● Animations of line drawings projected large directly onto the walls of the exhibition venue
● Interactive components: climbing ropes and swi[...]
