Sol Kjøk

Life and career

Sol Kjøk was born in Norway, where she grew up partly in Lillehammer, partly in Valdres. She has drawn since her early childhood and had her first professional exhibition when she was sixteen. Since then, her work has been in shown in 100 + shows worldwide in some twenty countries, including eight solo exhibits in the United States and Europe. After studying in Paris, Vienna, Medellín and the US, she obtained four graduate degrees, including a Magistère from the Sorbonne, The University of Paris, a Master of Arts in art history from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in Painting from Parsons The New School for Design. Kjøk has received over fifty awards and grants, including from the Tallinn International Drawing Triennial, the National Academy Museum and School in New York, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Arts Council Norway, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Vederlagsfondet, The Puffin Foundation, The Relief Fund for Visual Artists, Knut Hamsun's Award, The George Sugarman Foundation and the American-Scandinavian Foundation. In addition, she has received project support from the Royal Norwegian Embassies in Beijing, Berlin, Manila, New York and Tallinn. She has taught in art schools and universities as well as lectured at museums and art centers throughout Europe and the US. Her works, which originate as performance, are in the permanent collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Teckningsmuseet in Laholm, Sweden, the Kunsthaus Tacheles in Berlin, Germany and The Osten Museum of Drawings in Skopje, Macedonia, as well as numerous private and corporate collections throughout the world. She was chosen as one of twenty-one contemporary artists to be featured alongside Old Masters in the widely used textbook Drawing Essentials by Deborah A. Rockman published by Oxford University Press.

Work

Kjøk specializes in painting, drawing and performance with a focus on the nude figure. New York art critic Meghan Dailey describes her core themes as "the body, its limits and the tension between its strength and its vulnerability." In contrast to other artists who portray the nude at rest, Kjøk's bodies are usually in constant motion. This dynamic quality springs from her unique, highly athletic, immersive artistic technique. Her work begins in her studio, with she and her models engaging in an acrobatic process, "which incorporates picture taking, laborious posing and performance, cutting, collaging, rearranging and finally meditative reassemblage through drawing and painting..."

Kjøk, a marathoner, approaches large-scale wall drawings as an "extreme sport". Of her 2009 solo-exhibit at Kunsthaus Tacheles, it was reported; "The wall work in Berlin was made in one week, during which Sol Kjøk lived in the gallery and worked virtually around the clock for seven intense consecutive days." About the same exhibit, Meghan Dailey wrote, "For much of that period, she is alone (solitude being the optimal condition for maximum concentration), eating and sleeping very little. In the course of working so intensely, notions of the self and of time collapse, until mentally and physically, Kjøk reaches a heightened state in which she feels a part of the piece." Kjøk has completed "wall drawing as extreme sport" rounds in four countries.

Although highly physical in both its subject and execution, Kjøk's art also incorporates many spiritual themes. Of the paradoxically corporeal and spiritual quality of her work, Noel Kelly (curator) wrote "There is no doubt that these are sexual figures, However, the sometimes contorted physiognomy and physicality of the figures speaks of the sublime; a rapture wherein strength, tenderness, vigour and tempestuous urgency portray the essence of the human state." Jason Franz of Xavier University echoed this, saying "Ms. Kjøk writes of love, but her images are not necessarily sexual; at least no more than any other human image. No, if they are born of love, and therefore evoke love, it is of a higher order." Kjøk herself acknowledges this duality in her artist's statement, saying "I used to think that monastic seclusion at a safe distance from my body was the way to knowledge. Now I am convinced that human beings are clothed in flesh for a reason: The path is through the skin. Opting for either Dionysus or Apollo is choosing the easy way out; the challenge is to maintain the balance between the two." Despite these claims of a spiritual vision, some have found her work shockingly sensual with one writer describing her figures as "a cross between the androgynous representatives of some future race and the randy hippies of Alex Comfort's Joy of Sex".

Reception

Kjøk's work has received numerous accolades from critics. The prominent American critic Donald Kuspit praised her, saying, "Sol Kjok's figures – male and female nudes – are exquisitely drawn, often down to the least detail of their muscular flesh and expressive faces, indicating that she is not only a master draftsperson but a student of the human condition." […] "Certain passages of Swirling are sheer linear ecstasy – Kjøk seems to delight in the act of drawing itself, not simply in describing the figure."

New York Times art critic D. Dominick Lombardi wrote admiringly, "Sol Kjøk's art is playful and energetic.... Then there is a universal strength; a pleasure, a movement in her art that is clear and profound. It is obvious if you spend any time with her creations: Kjøk loves what she is doing. A feeling that emanates through every line, every form, every expression she records with obsessive precision..."

Swedish writer Britte Montigny said, "It is expertly done. So dazzlingly accomplished that you all but miss the fact that Sol Kjøk's work also holds existential questions with a full range of feelings, spanning from safety-seeking anxiety and fear, to protective love and joy of life."

In NYArts, Helmer Lång wrote "This makes for a kind of conceptual art where the artist directs the action, in such a way that the result reads both dramatic and mystifying. The viewer constantly feels that there is much more to this than a simple juggling with the organic forms of the human body; there are also symbolic accents and even a philosophy of life."

Solo exhibitions

Two-person exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Works in museums and public collections