The tides of loss and its onerous repetition—daily, weekly, annually—flow through Morten Knudsen’s painterly practice. Thick impasto surfaces, deep-hued colors, and a hint of fin de siècle. At first sight his flowery landscape paintings could be seen as romantic, nostalgic, yet they also reveal themselves as a surging virus: dirty, gnarly, uncontainable, and invasive.

Knudsen typically leaves an area of the canvas sparsely occupied. The painterly composition and its void spaces become a motif in themselves, evoking his son’s short life and the aftermath—the paralysis and exhaustion of grief; a condition Knudsen reworks perennially in his ongoing series of spirals, ritually reiterating the coiling symbol.