Rune Christensen

Rune Christensen

Rune Christensen (b. 1980) is a Danish artist. Rune's work is inspired by the process of living: the constant movement that results in encounters between individuals, cultures and societies, encounters affecting everyone involved. Driven by ever-present wanderlust, Christensen paints as he travels. His unmistakable expression comes from a hotchpotch of impressions from our diverse world. Within Christensen’s works there is an intensely overwhelming, excited melting pot of scents, colours, gazes and people: each painting the culmination of a rich life. Having exhibited in many places including Denmark, Beirut, Sydney, London and Almaty in Kazakhstan, his works cross as many borders as the artist himself has done.

Solo Exhibitions include (Upcoming) Beneath the Canopy, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach, USA (2025); Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Salon, West Palm Beach, USA (2024); Amass, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2024); Wildflowers, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2023); Wanderlust, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2022); Enter Art Fair, (Solo Booth), with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2022); No Church on Sundays, Galleri Sandberg Odense, Denmark (2021); Solo, Galerie Wolfsen, Aalborg, Denmark (2020);

Textured, Helium Cowboy, Hamburg, Germany (2018); Textured, Helium Cowboy Artspace, Hamburg, Germany (2017); Still Life, Fifty24SF Gallery, San Francisco, USA (2017); Solo Galerie Wolfsen, Aalborg, Denmark (2016); Solo Show, Gallery Hjorth, Horsens, Denmark (2014); Thoughts Of A Travelling Mind, Gallery Hjorth, Horsens, Denmark (2013); Redtape, Galleri Kirk, Aalborg, Denmark (2013).

Group Exhibitions include (Upcoming) Orbital, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2026); Fight Club, Better Go South Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2023); Coffee at Bedale Street, Cohle Gallery, Paris, France (2023); Enter Art Fair, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2023); Now Now Vol.2, Breach, Miami, Florida, USA (2023); Ephemeral Pleasures, Richard Heller Gallery, California, USA (2023); Where the Wild Roses Grow, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Schloss Görne, Germany (2023); 13 a Dozen, curated by Joachim Lambrechts, Gallery Sandberg, Odense, Denmark (2023); California Dreamin’, Lorin Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2023); Fightclub, Better Go South Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2023); Watch me burn, Ruttkowski 68, Paris, France (2022); KIAF, Elligere Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2022); Human, Piermarq Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2022); Disco Nap, Elligere Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2022); Duo show with Joachim Lambrechts, Galerie Wolfsen, Denmark (2022); In us we trust, Breach, Miami, USA (2021); In Momentum, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2021); Figurativ Samplers, Det nye Kastet Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2021); Somebody, Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco, US (2020); Stilles Leben, Affenfaust Galerie, Hamburg, Germany (2020); Group Show, Vra Contemporary Museum, Denmark (2019); Stillleben, Vrå, Contemporary Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2019); Urban Dawn, Beirut, Lebanon (2016); Urban Dawn, Kazakhstan (2015).

Highlights and Collections

Rune Christensen’s work can be found in the collection of The House of KOKO, London, UK; Easton Capital Collection, US; W Art Collection, China; The Bunker ArtSpace Museum, USA; and Steffen Heinze TDDT Collection.

Beneath the Canopy

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 lastest 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 fairytales 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 women 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.

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Rune Christensen: Beneath the Canopy