Scenes From The Second Story 2025
V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, DK
Rose Eken’s new ceramic snapshots – an art oxymoron, if ever there was one, combines the dynamic, ephemeral and intuitive composition of the snapshot with the contemplative, sensitive, meticulous and often volatile process of working in ceramics.
The ceramic paintings revolve around themes such as vulnerability, human connection, disputed beauty, desire, empowerment, intimacy, womanhood, fleeting youth, admiration and how personal emotion intersects with history. The new works feel diaristic yet carefully attuned to how images circulate and resonate culturally. Collapsing hierarchies -treating carefully composed portraits, iPhone blurs, still lives and casual snapshots with the same seriousness and dedication. In the new paintings Eken elevates her subjects to icons while not letting go of grit, fragility and longing. Seemingly classic motifs arise from mundane situations at the local bar, exhibition openings and concerts. Rather than realism, she aims for emotional truth and poetic resonance. Tender, at times wistful, but unsentimental, engaging and deeply human.
Scenes from the Second Story portrays an extended creative community (musicians, artists, performers, writers and creators of all sorts). An eclectic group of humans bonded or loosely intertwined by curiosity, creativity and Rose Eken. In and out of orbit around her and each other. In and out of synch in continuous motion. An abstract atom diagram with an elusive core. An expanding map with a shifting center. A dance ensemble with individual soundtracks and choreographies. The works never become naval gazing, as you don’t need to know this eclectic cast of characters to engage with them. There is joie de vivre, combined with a tristesse in the exhibition, remembering that dedicated creativity always comes at a cost, but not necessarily traditional benefits in your own lifetime. Moments like this never last – unless you keep and care for them. Scenes from the Second Story is a fractured poetic portrait of an ongoing moment -a movement.
– Jesper Elg
Scenes from the Second Story will be accompanied by a catalogue published on the occasion.
Slim & Krystal created an opening performance; A Little God In My Hands for the exhibition.
Light Your Shine 2023
Rose Eken and Mie Olise Kærgaard
Gammelgård, Herlev
“Eken’s death-poetic and gothic punk universe, which makes us look nervously towards Hell, is effectively counterpointed by Mie Olise’s expressive feminist allegories about invincible, modern Amazons who ride huge monsters, which they obviously have full control over.
Rose Eken has created a tour de force of a total installation – a whole world – in glazed paper clay. She impresses both in terms of the amount of works, which must have taken forever to produce, and with the works’ richness and refinement”
– Kunsten.nu
Read the full article here (in Danish)
View installations photos of the exhibition here.
NYC Flowers And Ghosts 2020 – 2022
Don’t Worry, Everything’s Cool
Alchemy, New York, USA
NYC Ghosts and Flowers is a ceramic “shrine” to old New York — a tribute to the city’s creative spirit and collective memory. Resembling a makeshift street memorial, it gathers nearly 300 hand-modelled, fired, and glazed objects that reference New York’s cultural history from the 1900s to today. Among flowers and candles are a bust of Anarchist Emma Goldman with her biography Living My Life, a mandolin inscribed as Woodie Guthrie’s guitar “This Machine Kills Fascists,” the New York Dolls debut album, the Daily Mirror front page from when John Lennon died, Mike Kelley’s crochet animals, a Patti Smith sketchbook, Warhol mug, Ramones’ worn Converse, and artefacts from the 1990s Lower East Side art scene. Blending personal memory with collective history, the work transforms loss into celebration – honoring rebellion, creativity, and hope for an uncertain future.
And The Forest Dream Eternally 2021
Eighteen Gallery, Copenhagen
A sublime darkness has fallen upon Rose Eken’s habitually bright and playful visual universe; step through the looking glass and emerge in a parallel world of sensual beauty and abyssal horror. The artist’s fifth solo exhibition with V1 Gallery / Eighteen transforms the white cube of Eighteen into an occult forest – here amid the gloomy silhouettes of naked tree trunks, we stumble upon a strange clearing, in which a surreal tableau seemingly unfolds.Ever the maverick medium between disparate worlds, Eken assembles a dramatic and empowering anti-mythos, adding her voice to a Zeitgeist of speculation, mysticism and spirituality spreading across our cultural landscape. Modern witchcraft and paganism delves into forgotten, often feminine, knowledge of nature and life, while new wave black metal seeks to amend its old habits of church-burning vandalism and problematic politics. Hence, a new generation of practitioners tirelessly mines the past, present and future for new and more sustainable modes of belonging. Like the witches and priestesses of yore, Eken conducts such spells and rituals through her artistic practice. The modern world may be profane and desolate, yet art holds the means of its re-enchantment.
Excerpt text by Astrid Wang
Ceramic Love Songs
Eighteen Gallery, Copenhagen
In Greek mythology, Eros is the son of Aphrodite, representing the erotic dimension of love. In Pla- to’s Symposion, he is rendered a somewhat abstract concept, expressing the desire to create and procreate, to extend our lives and selves in the material world. Compelling us to revisit this con- tested notion, particularly in the light of a global pandemic and great social and natural upheaval, Ceramic Love Songs presents an open-ended exploration of love, desire, sexual embodiment and eroticism through the perspective of Rose Eken.
Well-known for her meticulous still life objects in clay, Rose Eken presents a refreshingly punk take on the theme of Eros, exploring earthenware’s archaic function as vessels and carriers. Various jars, vases, bowls and containers recall antique artifacts but are glazed with lyrics from contem- porary pop songs. On one phallus-shaped vessel, PJ Harvey wonders whether desire is enough (Is This Desire, 2020). Others carry vignettes of disembodied hands wringing themselves, signing, and holding lifeless birds, evoking the death of innocence by the hand of love. Together, they make for a fragmented narrative of shipwrecked romances as well as a collection of fetish objects – testaments to the inseparability of physical and immaterial love.
Text by Astrid Wang
Horsens Art Museum, Horsens
Resistance 2018
V1 Gallery, Copenhagen
Stillife with Flowers and Fruit 2017
Market Artfair, Stockholm
Tableau 2015
V1 Gallery, Copenhagen
Ladys Handbag 2016
Frokosten 2015
Horsens Kunstmuseum, Horsens
Murder One 2012
Papbar 2010
Sindet har Ingen Tid, O-O-Overgaden, Copenhagen
Pap Bar is a life-size reconstruction of an imaginary bar, built entirely from cardboard and masking tape. Every detail is handmade — neon signs, bottles, ashtrays, even cigarettes — all painted to imitate the real objects. Only the glasses break the illusion: plastic cups painted inside to suggest beer, wine, or spirits. Beneath the surfaces, the bar and stools are reinforced with chipboard, making it possible to sit, lean, and linger.
Pap Bar merges fragments of many places: bars, artist hangouts, and legendary music venues. Measuring roughly 15–20 square meters, it can expand or shrink depending on the space. Like a travelling musician, it is rebuilt and adapted each time it appears, gathering traces of local stories and atmospheres as it moves from one place to another. Over time, it becomes a three-dimensional map of social memory.
Inside Pap Bar, time seems to stop. Even in daylight, it feels like three in the morning — that strange, suspended hour when everyone talks too much, smokes too much, and confides in the bartender. Visitors unconsciously take on their roles, becoming part of a quiet, improvised performance.
First shown in Time Out of Mind (Sindet Har Ingen Tid) at Overgaden – Institut for Samtidskunst, Copenhagen (September 3 – October 31, 2010), Pap Bar turns the familiar setting of the bar into a stage where every day behaviour becomes theatre.
