Theatricality plays an essential part in Constance Tenvik’s (b. 1990, Oslo) bringing together of performance, music, costume and fashion design, painting, drawing, sculpture, floor coverings, and large-scale wall drawings. Her practice is marked by emotional intensity, fierce passion, limitless curiosity, and forceful intuition. Frequently her exhibitions incorporate all of the aforementioned elements as glittering, colorful, immersive environments. Her paintings recall both the languid portraits of Henri Matisse and historic photographs from the Weimar Republic, all with a sense of decadence that expands with lighthearted enthusiasm into the surreal. Tenvik’s canvases convey both action and communion—wine glasses are perpetually upturned and caught mid-spill; long, curled fingers seek out those of another in a tender cuddle.

There is a freedom in Tenvik’s world not found within the constraints of IRL culture, gender, and physics. Her subjects don pastel-blue complexions and dripping feathers, and hover in midair over their friends in gentle conversation. The artist cites her frequent travels and artist residencies as sources of inspiration. Tenvik is very social, and painting a friend or acquaintance becomes an intimate dialogue as well as a record or diary entry of all the individuals she has met. Each new environment is an opportunity to expand her vocabulary of companionship, to meet subjects open to interpretation. The artist reflects: “Every time I find something external, I also kind of make it my own. . . . I’d say I have my own universe going on.”¹ With exuberance and curiosity, evident in everything from the electric yellow streaks in her subjects’ hair and fingers to their universally warm and confident gazes, Tenvik reinvents our staid reality and continues to expand in a fire of connection that will (hopefully) consume everything in its path.

Note
1. “Sense & Sensing: Within the Paracosm of Constance Tenvik,” Ways of UMBCing, University of Maryland, Baltimore County website, https://waysof.umbc.edu/sense-sensing-within-the-paracosm-of-constance-tenvik/.