Rune Christensen: Beneath the Canopy
Past exhibition
Rune Christensen: Beneath the Canopy
Past exhibition
Private View: Thursday, 18th of September 2025, 6-8pm
West Palm Beach (Florida, USA)
It is twilight. The sky is an inky blue, an orange moon hangs low over the mountains, casting its light across the forest floor, onto the tree trunks, along bare jagged branches. Here is a figure stretched out between the roots. Her eyes are closed, her body is soft. Patterned with stripes and leaves, she is more conspicuous than camouflaged but part of this world nonetheless: its inhabitant, spirit or guardian. Beneath the Canopy, a solo exhibition by Rune Christensen at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach, imagines the forest as a site of transformation, creativity and freedom. Within these paintings, figures play music, ride horses, charm snakes and commune with parrots flying between the trees. They are visions of an existence that feels ancient and other-worldly, epic and everyday.
Christensen has spent much of his life roaming the globe, hungry for new sights and experiences which both nourish his artistic practice and shape his compositions. Since becoming a father, he has swapped a nomadic existence for life in rural Denmark but through his two daughters, he has found a new kind of inspiration. He speaks with wonder of watching their imaginations take hold and of feeling the space around them begin to transform. This latest series, in particular, draws on his experiences of being in the forest with them, of playing and feeling a sense of magic that is ordinarily lost with adulthood.
The forest is a familiar setting from fairy tales where the dark cover of the trees proposes hidden wonders as well as dangers, particularly at night, but in Christensen’s paintings there is less a sense of unease than of comfort and embodiedness. The characters we meet are not just at home in this world, they seem to have emerged from it – their shadowy skin, flushes of fluorescence and clothing mirroring the colours and forms around them. Even in the most dynamic of the paintings, in which a girl sits on top of a rearing horse with a parrot perched on her wrist and another in the trees, there is a sense of calm and contentment. This work was inspired by a story Christensen read to his children of the first female Mongolian eagle hunter, and their consequential attempts at embodying her, but it also subverts historical depictions of the heroic. The ‘hero’ here is not only a woman, but in harmony with nature rather than against it – the traditional battle pose switched for an act of communing with nature.
The parrots are a recurring motif and to Christensen, a symbol of otherworldliness, the ways in which imaginative play expands reality. We see this unfold in the exhibition’s largest painting, the format of which recalls narrative tapestries. The show’s protagonists, the artist’s daughters, appear cantering into the composition from the right-hand side while ahead of them sits a snake charmer, another with a snake wrapped around a cane and a woman carrying vessels dangling from a yoke, with more pots and vases positioned on the forest floor. In some ways it feels like a familiar, almost cinematic scene: warriors returning to an ancient civilisation, but the setting, colours, the spectral quality of the figures and their particular arrangement creates a feeling of magic that goes beyond the ordinary. We don’t know quite what we are encountering but there is a feeling that anything could happen.
