This article first appeared in der Freitag.
A legend about the Roman boy emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, also known as Elagabalus, goes something like this: He once filled the suspended ceiling of his banqueting hall with so many violets and other flowers that when he rained them down on his guests, some of them suffocated under the heavy floral load and died.
The »crowned anarchist«, as the French writer and actor Antonin Artaud dubbed him in his 1933 biography, was notorious for his orgies and excesses. Elagabalus seized power at the age of 14 and was assassinated just four years later. Known as brutal, cowardly, despotic, sexually insatiable and perverse, he epitomised late Roman decadence at its most extreme. His scandalous life has riveted artists of all genres and periods, from the British painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema to the poet Stefan George and the musician John Zorn.
Like them, the Danish painter Oliver Bak—already hailed as a rising international art star at the age of 32—drew inspiration for his first solo exhibition at Galerie Sprüth Magers from the legends surrounding the terror and beauty of the Roman despot who ruled from 218 to 222 AD. The show, entitled ›Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist‹, will open to coincide with Berlin Art Week.
Bak’s studio is located on a run-down floor of a former office building in Copenhagen’s Nordvest district, a place far removed from the commercial glitz of the city’s picturesque centre. The neighbourhood has a modest, international feel and between the grey carpet and plastic ceiling panels, Bak’s paintings hang in a surprisingly tidy and minimal space. The stark simplicity of the architecture contrasts almost bizarrely with the evocative historicity of the paintings, but it suits the tall, gentle, slender artist with blond curls—a man whose only old-fashioned-seeming trait is his genuine, congenial modesty.
His paintings, by contrast, command an effortless authority, as if they have always been there—they seem both older than the building in which they are currently hanging, and as if they could not possibly have been made by an artist who only graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts a few years ago.
Alongside the references to Elagabalus’s deadly violets and the people languishing beneath them, Bak confidently references European cultural history in his work, drawing on symbols, aesthetics, and techniques from art history, literature, myth, and psychology. The past fascinates him: »It’s a construction, a fantasy. We tell ourselves the past as we would a story, and so it becomes part of our present.«
Bak’s paintings see flowers raise their heads, writhing bodies appear in semi-transparent hues, hunched figures spit blossoms onto the canvas. A ghostly flute player bewitches sleepers, lush trees stretch beyond the canvas with branches full of fluttering leaves. Fauns, dogs, skeletons—beauty and decay are everywhere. His work lies somewhere between Symbolism and Art Nouveau, the Nabis, Surrealism and Expressionism.
Tough times in Paris
History, fantasy, myth—all of them topoi that fascinated Bak throughout his studies. Asked about the origins of his visual repertoire, the painter says he spent countless days in the library, leafing through old catalogues in search of paintings he didn’t know. But it’s not just painting that interests him—his references extend to literature and poetry. During a residency in Paris, he was deeply inspired by ›Caves en plein ciel‹ (Caves in the open sky), the first collection of poems by the French poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, written in 1925 when the author was just 18. The volume moved Bak to create the entire series. »It was as if I was communicating with the author through my art,« he explains. »I had a hard time in Paris, and I know he also had a hard time in Paris back then. I can’t say which came first—my own feelings or whether I was absorbing and adapting his experience through this intense engagement with his poems.« Bak pauses to think for a moment before summing up the period: »It can be beautiful to communicate with something from the past and build your own images from it.«
Bak uses oil paint and beeswax to bring his motifs to canvas, which is stretched over sleek, contemporary aluminium slats. He spends a great deal of time on each piece and does not make many in a year due to the slow, meticulous process of drying, layering, overpainting and scraping. Bak often removes layers of paint from the canvas and paints over it again, leaving residue and fragments behind. How present is the invisible? Can the absent be made tangible? Palpable? How does the unconscious materialise? Is overpainting an act of concealment or destruction? Asking Bak these questions, he pauses to think. The artist doesn’t give straight answers, but it’s clear that the queries touch on topics that resonate with him deeply, setting off a cascade of thoughts and associations—like a chain of falling dominoes—that may be too complex to unravel.
The fact that Bak’s work raises more questions than it answers may be part of the secret of his early success—an ascendancy on full view this spring at Art Basel, where Galerie Sprüth Magers first showed his work. His current exhibition at the gallery’s Berlin location marks his German debut. The German capital’s fragmented history offers a fitting backdrop for Bak’s elusive images: like the city itself they become more complex the closer you examine them, caught in a constant synthesis.
Looking at Bak’s paintings, it is easy to see links to Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch, Paul Sérusier and other pioneers of progressive, in some cases revolutionary, art movements of the past. But his quotes go beyond mere regression and kitschy imitation; his work shows no sign of the revenants of a sticky historical imagery; instead, Bak creates his own ghosts. ›Greyhound Ghost Dog‹ (2024), as one of his works is titled, features an androgynous figure with its head bowed and hands clasped, kneeling behind a greyhound whose muzzle faces the viewer directly. The two figures, shrouded in hazy white, occupy a dark space that hints at a vague perspective. »In ancient Rome, greyhounds were seen as omens of ghosts,« Bak explains, and like a distorted image, the dog in his current exhibition heralds the ever-present spirits in Bak’s work. The few human figures that do appear in his paintings always seem to lower their gaze. They exude an air of introversion, caught between contemplation and melancholy, spirituality and impermanence.
It’s as if the decline of beauty is the very condition for its existence in Bak’s paintings, with decay ever visible, along with the horror of the finite, of the abject. Recurring motifs, including what he calls the »flower spitter«—a figure vomiting flowers—seem to expose the brutality required to materialise beauty, to bring beauty into existence. It suggests the effort Bak makes to turn the beauty of his inner thoughts outward, to give them visible, tangible form in his paintings.
Bak builds his paintings on intensely coloured undercoats, layer by layer: »It’s like layering emotions, which is also a big part of the painting process.« Partially visible traces of previous removal and over-painting point to the material process as much as to the intellectual one. To time and effort, but also to struggle and destruction—as if the painter were in awe of his own creative power, of the spirits he has conjured.
How does Bak know when a painting is finished? He looks for a moment of surprise, of the unexpected—for something startling even for him: »Sometimes the work takes a turn and becomes something I never intended to paint. When I get to that point, I know I can let it go.«
The last painting in the exhibition, at least according to Bak’s wishes at the time of the show’s hanging and our interview, is a portrait-like still life of dried orchids. The flowers are one of the few direct references to Bak’s own life in the exhibition; his father was a passionate orchid grower from the time Bak was a child. Perhaps this love of slow-growing beauty runs in the family, even though Bak is the only one to have pursued a career in the visual arts. Cultivating the most beautiful flowers—perhaps that’s the perfect metaphor for Bak’s practice. As in biology, his visual language develops through a process of mutation over long periods of time, driven by a pure passion for overwhelming, almost otherworldly beauty. Perhaps this is Bak’s own, subtle rebellious moment. Everything is beauty. And while art and activism struggle for meaning and relevance, and Elagabalus appears as a distorted image of a world gone mad, where some suffocate in luxury while others are sacrificed for it, a young Dane quietly paints his own Dionysian struggle between madness and ecstasy with such a careful hand that he transcends it all—the trends, doubts and discourses of an (art) world gone wild.
›Oliver Bak. Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist‹, Galerie Sprüth Magers, 14 September to 2 November 2024