![]() ![]() I became very zoomed out, taking a perspective where humanity as a concept, on this planet, our whole existence is only two seconds on Earth’s clock.” “I made sense of it by making too much sense of it. “At around 14-15 years old I curled up mentally for some time after my grandfather died,” he says. Where does all the darkness come from? Credit: Ollo Weguelin All broken up with mischievous laughter and mugs of high quality coffee that pours from his studio kitchen. Calm, polite, every opinion measured out as carefully as he marks out the ratio and contours of the human form. Henrik Uldalen, who was born in Korea and raised Norway, doesn’t project as a destructive, tortured artist when you meet him. “Others even say it’s motivated by hatred for women or hatred for minorities (if he destroys a face belonging to a woman or person of colour.) It’s nothing to do with hatred it’s all to do with frustration and troubles with myself. “Some people think it’s all for shock value,” he says when he destroys a face as soon as he lovingly creates it. “Some people think it’s just for shock value:”īut, like any online arena, Uldalen’s tutorials can sometimes be a tough crowd. But it shouldn’t be like that – there is unlimited space to show your work enough room, space and money to sell your art.” Henrik says, “there is this guarded idea that, If I raise someone else up, this guy is going to take my space. How much red to apply to get exactly the right shade for the blood vessels on a subjects’ face.”Īll of this is filmed and unpacked in detail on his Insta pages, with feedback handled with patience and care. You’re painting in front of a class of grown-ups and they say, “Why do you do that? Why do you do this?” It makes me think, “Oh shit, that is why I do it!” You suddenly get to understand your own work better. ![]() ![]() “You initially think you have nothing to say, but painting changes that. “When you have to verbalise why you do something, it makes you a better painter,” he says. Credit: Ollo Weguelinįor Uldalen, burning it all down and giving it all away, is actually making him a better artist. The largest palette knives, used to daub impasto and wax on the canvas, are the kind a baker would use to slather icing on a wedding cake. As if on a surgeon’s operating table, brushes and palette knives sit in parallel rows. It feels great!”įor a man whose works project an otherworldly sense of pained purgatory, Uldalen’s studio is unnervingly organised. It makes me feel I can do what I want while I am making it. Now I spend a whole day on a portrait, the next day I destroy it. Now, I don’t want to put my work on a pedestal and adore it. “I would obsess over a nose or a mouth, spend days on it and sometimes I might succeed or fail. “For years, my work would be too precious,” says Henrik of his bonfire of the vanities. Considering his works normally sail past £40,000 at auction perhaps his accountant might be a little nervous of this new business plan. At his south London studio, he puts his face through one of the holes and grins, Tasmanian devil-style. Henrik attacks his own works with the vigour of a teenager repurposing an old pair of jeans, a smear of thick wax, a dangerously risqué new hole. But some of his as yet unseen works are so damaged that – beyond the scorched holes in the canvas – you can see the frames’ wooden skeleton and the brick walls behind them. The haunting, fragile beauty in the painting remains – the untouched parts almost accentuated by the craters missing. Each session is part-artists’ TED Talk, part-crime scene investigator as another immaculately created face bites the dust. While many other noted artists like Banksy or Jerkface hide behind a name, he has been filming and unpacking all of his techniques in forensic detail for the benefit of his one million Instagram followers. Credit: Ollo WeguelinĪlongside this, Henrik, 34, has also been busy giving away all his secrets too. Whereas once he artfully layered blizzards of impasto brushwork over his canvases, he now obliterates them with industrial blow torches and turpentine, vanquishing each canvas’ delicately-formed porcelain fingers and sallow ivory bone structures almost as soon as they are formed. ![]() Henrik Uldalen, the Norwegian artist who’s spent his career painting beautiful faces only to distort and smear them, has now gone full wrecking ball. We spent time with Henrik Uldalen, an artist not just creating compelling work, but destroying it as well. ![]()
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