Category archives: Painter
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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[...]
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Solo Exhibits
2011 my pockets are full of you, Curator: Francesca Arcilesi Fine Art pop-up show, NY, NY
2010 feeling untethered I laid down my memories at Amos Eno Gallery, NY, NY
2006 ashy tongues whispering in smokey ears at Next Gallery, Denver, CO
Group Exhibitions
2012 Recess at Arcilesi & Homberg Fine Art (FAFA), Brooklyn, NY
2012 Color at BWAC, curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Brooklyn, NY
2012 Works on Paper at Jeffrey Leder Gallery, NY, NY
2012 Remembering at Attleboro Arts Museum, Attelboro, MA
2012 Annual Competition at SAAC, curator Manuela Well-Off-Man, El Dorado, AK
2012 Wide Open 3 at BWAC, Brooklyn, NY
2012 WannA Piece?, Curator: Francesca Arcilesi Fine Art pop-up show, NY, NY
2011 Sorry 4 the Wait, Curator: Francesca Arcilesi Fine Art pop-up show, NY, NY
2011 Glimpses Beyond, Curator: Francesca Arcilesi Fine Art pop-up show, NY, NY
2011 110°: 2011 Summer Group Show at Cohn Drennan Contemporary, Dallas, TX
2011 Identity Shift Migration, Identity&Longing, Curator:Francesca Arcilesi Fine Art, NY,NY
2011 Wide Open 2 at BWAC, Brooklyn, NY
2011 In Vivid Color at Gallery M, Vienna, Austria
2011 Better by the Dozen at BAU, Beacon, NY
2011 Natural Selection 2.0 at DSU, Madison, South Dakota
2010 Confluences of Culture VI at Walter Wickiser Gallery, NY, NY
2010 Crossroads/Seven Acts at Amos Eno Gallery, NY, NY
2009 Confluences of Culture IV at Walter Wickiser Gallery, NY, NY
2009 Exhibit 0/1 at 25-Kadr Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2006 Open Show at S[...]
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My father worked for different Texas oil companies in the 1970's and 80’s and because of the nature of the work, every couple of years my family was uprooted, moved across county lines, and resettled. Creating stories for myself and role playing became my way of processing the changes I experienced. The work I’ve done so far depicts the emotional landscape of my childhood as I remember it—a blur of color and movement flashing by the static iconography of the past: those tiny company houses where the roughnecks lived, old-style telephone poles and pumpjacks. And enveloping that landscape, out of balance in scale, space, and perspective, are these figures that seem to dominate and subdue, not with violence, but with curiosity and playful interaction. Interrupting the flow of abstract shapes with simple flat black and white houses and telephone poles breaks the viewing pace, as if a light bulb pop across the setting of the implied narrative —pulling the viewer into a space undefined where they can figure out the story or pretend a new one.
