About

A Norwegian-born New Yorker, Sol Kjøk lives at and runs Mothership NYC, the Brooklyn arts residency platform she founded in 2005. After studies in Paris, Athens (GA), Vienna, Medellín and Cincinnati that earned her three graduate degrees in humanities, she obtained an MFA in painting at Parsons School of Design in New York. An avid drawer all her life, Kjøk’s work has been featured in 100+ shows worldwide. She has held artist residencies in several countries, taught at universities and art schools and lectured at museums and art centers throughout the US. Her work, which originates as performance, is featured in Drawing Essentials (Oxford University Press), a textbook widely used in fine arts programs in the US. A recipient of more than 50 awards and artist’s grants, Kjøk is represented in public collections such as the Cincinnati Art Museum, Teckningsmuseet [the Nordic Museum of Drawing], and the Osten Museum of Drawing, as well as numerous private and corporate collections throughout the world. In 2011, Kjøk founded NOoSPHERE Arts, a nonprofit exhibition and performance venue in Manhattan with the objective of bringing artist colleagues from elsewhere to New York. Now operating out of the same Brooklyn warehouse that is also home to Kjøk’s painting studio, aka Last Frontier NYC, this 501c3 organization continues to present multidisciplinary arts programming across several NYC platforms.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I create figurative drawings and paintings —preferably life-size and beyond— dealing with the fundamental interrelatedness and interdependence of all living things and the constraints imposed by our physical bodies. My scenarios are not mental constructs; they come from wordless places such as dreams, meditation, and other states of altered consciousness. Their truth, which viewers may recognize from their own nightly visions, suffers from being squeezed through the bottleneck of verbal language.

I believe this imagery springs from a well that we all share. Western civilization is now at a pivotal point where cutting-edge science is starting to prove what mystics and ancient cultures have always intuitively known: All matter in the universe exists in a web of connection and constant influence; thought is simply another form of transmitted energy actively shaping our world. The consequence is no less than a revolutionary paradigm shift: We can no longer view ourselves and our minds as the private, self-contained workings of an individual brain. In short, we are oneness having the experience of separateness.

To give physical form to images bubbling up from the unconscious, I use my own and my friends’ bodies as a visual and visceral source. I gather my loved ones to pose with me, often in acrobatically challenging ways using circus contraptions suspended from my studio ceiling. This hands-on physical experience allows me to know in my bones the tension between gravity and the freedom of the leap, thus exploring aspects of the human condition that are particularly interesting to me: pushing against our limits; the risk of falling; the co-presence of vulnerability and strength.

I work in a mixed technique where fluid layers of acrylic and then oils interweave with outlines crisply drawn with Pierre Noire or crayon, probing the pull between control and surrender.  The resulting artworks can be displayed in all directions, as their story is one of constant flux and cyclical time. I aim for a continuous quality where nothing has an endpoint, and one movement flows into the next, like a ribbon. Since every figure depicted is a real person in my life featured in multiple works created over the course of decades, I also see this imagery as an exploration of the concept of reincarnation: “Every lifetime, we meet the same circle of souls, to say thank you or to say sorry, and once again exchange our roles.” (From ‘Amen’ by Gogol Bordello, my favorite New York gypsy punk band.)

For a longer, annotated version of current Artist Statement, please click.
And if you really want to know the story behind those glowing spheres… HERE goes!