Spring 2025 program

Established as a kunsthalle for artists by artists back in 1986, O—Overgaden continues to be one of the few large-scale art institutions in Denmark with a focus on supporting emerging practices, local and international. This spring, O mounts major shows by emerging practitioners including painters Cecilie Norgaard and Victor Bengtsson, and sculptors Samara Sallam and Birke Gorm. Each show is accompanied by a new edition in O’s publication series, released in print and online, and designed by fanfare.

Cecilie Norgaard: Emotionally Invested
February 22–May 4, 2025
In densely layered, colorful canvases, Cecilie Norgaard’s (b. 1991, DK/AU/DE) conceptual oil paintings humorously tease out the hierarchical highs and lows of contemporary society. Norgaard’s new painting series, produced for O—Overgaden, focuses on mundane, everyday objects. Colored pencils, numbers, and letters; piggy banks, cars, clocks, and trucks crash, repeat, or multiply in the paintings, collectively creating a tongue-in-cheek, absurdist universe mixing school tools with pecuniary and protestant (time) pressure. Part of a circular alphabet, each individual motif becomes an item in a wider ensemble of recirculated figures, bleeding from one painting into another. Jointly, the images seem to form an inventory of working-class baseline tools turned primary and painterly, aesthetic objects. Yet, in the midst of this prompt to create new surfaces for aesthetic experiences, there is something unsettling about Norgaard’s inescapable and circular world of images. When the cute piggy bank is broken, it simply reveals another broken piggy bank.

Victor Bengtsson: Horse droppings are not figs
February 22–May 4, 2025
Victor Bengtsson (b. 1997, DK) amalgamates visual inspiration from traditional, biological illustrations and the detailed density of Flemish Renaissance paintings with motifs quoting Danish peasantry—think: plows, pigs, beets. For O—Overgaden, Bengtsson has a series of new works, a centerpiece being a 6-meter-wide painting, made by rubbing color onto hessian, impregnating motifs into the rough structure of the fabric. Leaving the threads visible, the free-hanging colored textile alludes to historical weavings—a kind of poor man’s Gobelin. Mimicking the grand storytelling of traditional tapestries, this piece is an epic depiction of rural life in Northern Europe as if (mis)understood from a distant future. More fabulation than fact, the painting’s soft colors unfold a rural world gone wrong. These shadow motifs and their distorted depictions merge historical farming and fishing culture, thus corrupting the idea of a true history, hinting at how pseudoscientific or fake narratives still lurk behind our perception of reality today.

Samara Sallam: A Speaking Puddle of Blood
May 23–August 3, 2025
Following language and its movement through our bodies and worlds, sculptor and hypnotherapist Samara Sallam (b. 1991, PL/DK) creates carefully crafted physical objects that outline a liminal space or edifice of meaning and words, commanding transcendence or contemplation. For O—Overgaden, Sallam reworks the Palestinian folk tale archetype of the Ghoula—a flesh-eating monster who devours her family and destroys her whole village—into a story of finding “meaning,” unfolding in three acts. Visitors enter Sallam’s exhibition through a carved wooden portal—the first of three sculptures—equally casting a creation spell and forming a monster’s body. The second sculpture is a small, dead ceramic bird with an open belly acting as a compass, while Sallam’s final piece is a giant hypnotic fish head, a symbol of wisdom and transitioning that points—as a shadow membrane or third portal—to another level of consciousness. While silent, almost withdrawn in its appearance, Sallam’s rite-of-passage trio of sculptures—combining inherent violence, existential quests, and the need to ascend spiritually—also forms a metaphor for resistance against the current, ceaseless attacks on the Palestinian people.

Birke Gorm: let me stop you right there
May 23–August 3, 2025
Trash, identity, consumption: Birke Gorm (b. 1986, DE/DK) collects scrap material from her surroundings and the public dump, then sculpts, sews, and assembles, defying the speed of late capitalist society. At the core of Gorm’s new works for her solo exhibition at O—Overgaden sits a question about the circular do’s and don’ts of public behavior—the unpicking of what’s high and what’s low, what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s trash and what’s not. Reflecting on what rules apply when humans are trained to handle the chores of our communal spaces, dangerously sharp materials are composed as eerie chandelier-like clusters, high-hung, far from touch, flipping their junk appearance into one of flashing glitter while hovering above a floor installation made from waste cardboard. Meanwhile, in another new series, Gorm creates a horizon of hundreds of neatly aligned dolls produced from tea towels and napkins.

Team: Rhea Dall (Director & Chief Curator), Vera Østrup (Curator & Project Coordinator), Asta Kjærulff Bay (Press Coordinator), Toke Martins (Installation Manager), Nanna Friis (Managing Editor), Anne Kølbæk Iversen (Postdoc Researcher).

Support: O’s main funder is the Danish Arts Foundation. Further generous supporters include Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen’s Foundation, the Obel Family Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation, and Beckett-Fonden.