Press Release: Scandinavian Trio
Exhibition duration: June 12 - July 4 2026
We meet three artists in the exhibition Scandinavian Trio, who each in their own way work with something deeply familiar: the human need to belong. In a time where everything around us is in constant motion - relations, identity, places, and the way we live - the artists circle around those spaces, connections, and experiences that we try to hold on to. Through intimate interiors, searching characters, and connections between humans and nature, the exhibition looks into the near as something both fragile and necessary. It reflects on how we create presence, meaning, and belonging in a world that often feels uneasy and changeable.
Emilia Nurmivaara (born 1992, Vantaa, Finland) has been a regular part of Gallery Poulsen for the past five years. Emilia paints intimate spaces, such as our homes. These spaces are vehicles of memory, presence, absence, and different states of heightened perception. The familiar begins to shift slightly, becoming porous and unstable—as though the spaces exist somewhere between the tangible and the remembered. It is these displacements we see in Emilia’s paintings; it is they that remind us of all those layers existing in the spaces and interiors that we inhabit.
Jacob Dahlstrup (born 1985, Ry, Denmark) is, with this exhibition, making his comeback, and we are incredibly happy to be able to show his work again. Jacob contributes three new paintings for Scandinavian Trio. The figure always returns in his paintings—not as a portrait or a specific character, but more as a state of being, something that tries to keep balance or is trying to change direction. In that way his work revolves around a search or a transformation, like something we could experience in a dream, where we in vain try to hold on to something tangible or try to connect things. In the same way, objects often appear in the paintings that send or receive signals. In the new paintings, a fictive antenna is a recurring theme.
Maya Ripley (born 1979, Taastrup, Denmark) is making her debut at Gallery Poulsen in this show. In her paintings Maya explores the connection between humans and nature, where women are portrayed as strong, present main characters. With roots in Scandinavian, Balkan, and Southwestern American influences, her paintings unite boldly composed floral compositions, folk art-inspired ornaments, and contemporary portraiture in vivid visual stories about intuition, memory, and belonging. In Maya’s paintings she invites the viewer into a space where people and nature do not exist separately, but in quiet harmony. We have been following Maya’s artistic career for several years, and it is therefore a great pleasure to be able to present her artworks to our audience.
Even though the three artists work very differently, their painting revolves around the human need for connection—to places, to nature, and to each other. Scandinavian Trio becomes in that way an exhibition about the near; about those spaces, relations, and experiences we try to hold on to when the world around us is in constant flux.
The show presents a total of 16 new paintings.
Opening Friday June 12, 17.00 – 19:00
Gallery Poulsen, Staldgade 32, Copenhagen
For more info: +45 33 33 93 96, [email protected],
