Contemporary Scandinavian Art

No open-access works for Contemporary Scandinavian Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About Contemporary Scandinavian Art

Recent Nordic art has no single style, but some threads recur: close attention to light, weather and natural phenomena, and a habit of turning design, welfare and institutions into subject matter. Steina Vasulka, born in Iceland, helped pioneer video art in New York from around 1970 with her husband Woody Vasulka. The Finnish draughtsman Touko Laaksonen, known as Tom of Finland, drew exaggerated homoerotic figures from the 1950s that later entered museums.

Olafur Eliasson, raised between Denmark and Iceland, builds installations from light, mist, ice and water; Your rainbow panorama (2011) is a circular walkway of coloured glass on a rooftop in Aarhus. The duo Elmgreen & Dragset restage institutions and private spaces, as in Prada Marfa (2005), a sealed boutique in the Texas desert. The Danish collective SUPERFLEX designs tools for social and economic change, and the Swedish painter Mamma Andersson paints hushed, theatrical interiors and landscapes.

The makers