ASMUND HAVSTEEN-MIKKELSEN Denmark, b. 1977

View works. ASMUND HAVSTEEN-MIKKELSEN
Looking Back on Evolution, 2020, 100 x 130 cm, Oil on canvas
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Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen lives and works in Copenhagen. For more than a decade he has been working with architecture as a subject and as a story about how architecture frame the life we live. He draws on philosophical, psychological and societal aspects of architecture and thereby highlights how space both reveals the will of society but also our desires and utopian dreams. His paintings have a characteristic and unsual cropping, often painted in a dimmed palette with a few but signifying color markings. Balancing between realism and a move towards abstraction they create a feeling of unease and suspension in the viewer.

His most recent exhibition, More News from Nowhere from 2021, considered how the climate crisis is intimately connected to the spaces we live in – and move through. By juxtaposing images of gasstations and modern houses he drew attention to how the everyday is constituted by a huge consumption of fossil fuels.

Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen has studied literature and philosophy at Copenhagen University, and he graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. Between 2007-2015 he lived and worked in Berlin. In 2018 his project 'Flooded Modernity', a capsized replica of Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye in Vejle Fjord, went viral internationally. He has participated in Danish and international exhibitions and is represented in numerous private and public collections in Europe, US, and South Korea - among others the Danish Arts Foundation, New Carlsberg Collection, Novo Nordisk Collection and The Swedish Art Council.