Nina Sten-Knudsen

Nina Sten-Knudsen's solo exhibition Iokaste at Stalke Galleri, Vesterbrogade 15A, featured a series of large oil paintings where landscape, architecture, and mythological references are intertwined in calm, open pictorial spaces. The exhibition was based on the Greek tragedy of Oedipus, but without directly illustrating the plot. Instead, the works focused on absence, memory, and the traces of history, often through empty spaces, sloping landscapes, and figures reduced to silhouettes or signs.

In a review by Poul Erik Tøjner, emphasis was placed on the materiality of the paintings and how Sten-Knudsen works with oil painting as a slow, layered medium where mood and structure convey meaning rather than narrative. Mikkel Bogh, in his review, highlighted that the history in these paintings does not appear as dramatic action, but as something displaced and fragmented, with the past present as traces rather than motifs. In a review in the City Art column, Ole Nørlyng pointed out the exhibition's mythological undercurrent and how Sten-Knudsen moves between the figurative and the abstract without establishing a definitive interpretation.

Overall, the exhibition was read as an example of how Stalke Galleri, during this period, presented paintings that reflect on art history, myth, and perception, without abandoning the traditional canvas as a field of work.

Exhibition views from Nina Steen Knudsen’s 1990 solo show at Stalke Galleri, showing monumental oil paintings that merge architecture, landscape, and history into meditative spatial scenes.

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