Artist to Watch: Oliver Bak Defies Traditional Style with Mysterious Floral Motifs

The haunting appearance of the rising star’s canvases stems from an urge to “hold on to an image in my mind,” he says, which may be as mundane as a pot of withered orchids at his Copenhagen studio or as remarkable as an anecdote about watchdogs for ghosts in ancient Rome. To achieve this luminous quality, Bak mixes wax into the oil before scraping the amalgam onto the linen surface in small gestures.

Bak complements the psychological puzzle in his compositions with historical references submerged beneath his lush colors. This process of “building up” keeps some of his figures sunken below the dominating color. “Removing parts of the painting merges the hierarchy of the background and the figures,” he says.

This month, the artist is presenting his debut solo exhibition with global powerhouse gallery Sprüth Magers in Berlin with an homage to 19th-century Anglo-Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888). Bak is enthralled by the masterpiece’s detrimental indulgence, depicting the teenage Roman emperor Heliogabalus’s bacchanal guests drowning in flurries of rose petals. The grotesque infatuation with beauty to a destructive extent is its charm: “Painting to me is about balancing the contradiction of romance with horror and how they can coexist,” says Bak.

His latest body of work captures not only his intellectual curiosities but also his interest in the surrounding nature. The copper-hued Autumn Tree came out of the artist’s vision of a crisp Berlin fall. “I thought there might be fallen leaves outside of the gallery window, so I wanted the painting to mirror the view,” he says.

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2024 Collectors Issue in the “Artists to Watch” section. Subscribe to the magazine.