ARTIST RENE HOLM
Antakly Projects · The Conversation
René Holm
The Danish painter on forests and graffiti, the people who live at the edge of the norm, and why he keeps returning to the trees
Denmark
Why this conversation
When I look at René Holm’s paintings I hear The Cure. His forests have the exact temperature of A Forest, that cold, beautiful dread, and what I want, more than anything, is to stand in front of one of these enormous canvases with that song playing and let the two things meet. His work is about community, and about the people who live a little outside the lines society draws, set down in landscapes that are gorgeous and faintly menacing all at once.
He comes out of a generation that has made the last fifteen years one of the richest in Danish art since the Romantics, a scene that is international in outlook, unafraid of colour, and far more engaged with society than the one before it. Olafur Eliasson may be its most globally visible name, but Holm belongs to the same flowering, and he arrived at painting by an unlikely road, through the forest and through graffiti.
As a kid I loved to play in the forest and build huts. Maybe that is why I paint trees today.René Holm
From the forest to graffiti and back
Holm did not grow up in a house full of art. What he had was a schoolteacher who took the class to the local museum once a month, and an urge of his own that he still cannot fully explain. Then, around seventeen, the Hip Hop wave broke over Europe, breakdance and graffiti arriving from the United States, and a boy with a rebellious streak and a love of drawing on a large scale was completely hooked. He spent roughly eight years writing graffiti in Denmark before the first canvases came, in the mid nineties, abstract at first, then overrun with words and questions, until painting quietly became the whole of it.
The Conversation
Where does your inspiration come from?
It is very simple. My inspiration is people, and our dynamics. What we do to each other, in both the good ways and the bad ones. What I see and what I feel. And, of course, nature.
Tell me about your process.
It begins with an idea. Usually I just pin a note up in the studio, sometimes for years, before I know exactly why and how I want to approach it. Then the research starts. I go out to the countryside and document places with my camera. I have been making drawings alone in a room since I was a child, so in a way the process has never really changed, it has only grown up.
How does technology affect your work?
Not much, directly. I am old school. I love working with traditional materials, canvas, oil paint, pigment. That said, I am making my first NFT right now, so I suppose technology has found its way into the process after all.
What do you make of the art world, and how it keeps changing?
Honestly, it is about luck and networking as much as anything. It would be nice to believe it is only about talent and hard work, but really it is about the relationships you build with the right collectors and gallerists, and they are very often the ones who decide your fate as an artist. As for where it is all heading, I think we are all still waiting to see what happens with NFTs. Is it here to stay? Nobody knows yet.
What does wellbeing mean to you?
A lot of things. New experiences. Meeting interesting people. Making the perfect painting. Time in the studio. Travelling the world, and of course nature. And it matters to have fun, to dance. I have a real weakness for a good old fashioned cocktail.
Anything else you want to leave us with?
Only that I hope to keep making art for as long as I possibly can, and to keep challenging my own work while I do it.
About Antakly Projects
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