Born 1992 in Denmark
Lives and works in Copenhagen

Often drawing on art historical references, Bak's paintings contain a temporal complexity establishing the possibility of a new horizon between the past and today. Substantial chromatic backgrounds transforming into vague landscapes inhabited by human figures, animals and natural objects. The interplay between his beings and their environments are deliberately blurred, weaved together by a glow or its opposite, as if to point at the social and psychological contractions of the characters as symbolic gestures. The material processes and layers are pulling the imagery farther away from the source material and into its own reality, where narratives unfold untroubled by a lyricism of the past. Bak's motifs suggest a take on the romantic, but one that is muted by internalised emotion and expression — a calm dramatics, searching for a point where the figures are equally emerging from and camouflaged by their surroundings, protected and empowered by them.

Each body of work departs from a single narrative held at length. For his 2024 exhibition in Berlin this was Artaud's biography of the Roman child emperor Heliogabalus, arrived at by way of Alma-Tadema's The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888); more recently, in Rome, bodies caught flickering between presence and phantasm.

Education
2020 Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, DK

Recent Solo Exhibitions:
Swarmers, Indipendenza, Rome, IT (2025–26); Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, DE (2024); Caves in the Sky, Cassius & Co, London, UK (2023); Sick with Bloom, ADZ Gallery, Lisbon, PT (2022).

Bak's solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, New York, opens in November 2026.

Recent group exhibitions:
FOCUS on The Collection, Krupa Art Foundation (2026); Songs before Sunrise, Sprüth Magers, London, UK (2025); The Flowers of Evil, Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, DE (2024–25); Doll-Soul, ADZ Gallery, Lisbon, PT (2023); Fragments, ADZ Gallery, Lisbon, PT (2021); Degree Show, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, DK (2020); Phantom Folly, Bianca D'Alessandro, Copenhagen, DK (2019); Little Soul, Bianca D'Alessandro, Copenhagen, DK (2019); World Bone, Arcway [...]

Selected press and publications:
Oliver Bak, monograph, texts by Hilka Dirks, Nils Emmerichs and Louis Scherfig, Sprüth Magers (2024); Jens Asthoff, Artforum (2024); Phin Jennings, Plaster Magazine (2025).