Bagatelle : Victor Bengtsson
25 November 2026 - 23 January 2027

  • Albion Jeune is pleased to present Bagatelle, a solo exhibition by Victor Bengtsson (b. 1997, Copenhagen), bringing together a new body of paintings that examine the shared state of flux across archaeology, technical modes of display, and theatre. Working across large-scale figurative painting and architectural forms of presentation, Bengtsson creates densely layered environments in which historical fragments, archival structure, and theatrical construction coexist. The exhibition furthers his investigation of painting as a site of excavation, where images appear to emerge from, rather than simply sit atop, the surface. 

     

    Working on unprimed jute canvas, Bengtsson applies acrylic with a dry brush, slowly rubbing pigment into the fibres of the canvas. Rather than building an image through conventional layers of paint, his process is explicit: each layer remains visible, allowing forms to accumulate gradually and transparently. Like an excavation site, the resulting works possess a tactile, faded quality, appearing simultaneously newly made yet resurfaced from an archive. Some forms are fully uncovered and clearly rendered; others reveal the process, with traces, tools and remnants left exposed. 

  • The relic is central to Bengtsson’s practice. Archaeological remains offer fragments from which an entire object, body or event must...

    The relic is central to Bengtsson’s practice. Archaeological remains offer fragments from which an entire object, body or event must be reconstructed; a fossil, likewise, is both evidence of what existed and an imprint of what is no longer there. Bengtsson’s paintings operate within the same tension between presence and absence. Figures, objects and environments seem to disintegrate and emerge at once, producing images that are recognisable yet persistently elusive. 

     

    Bengtsson’s paintings can be read as future relics: objects that appear to have been recovered from an uncertain time. Drawing on his medical education, he is interested in the way the history of science is told, where discovery is narrated through a mix of rigorous observation and invention, and where even the most improbable tales are presented within a credible, scientific frame. His relics adopt the same manner. Borrowing from medieval history, Bronze Age archaeology, medicine and science, the paintings present the speculative as if it had been carefully examined and catalogued. Alongside reference images, his mises-en-scène take in memories, anecdotes and fragments of information gathered over a lifetime. Historical and scientific sources are never treated as fixed knowledge; filtered through memory, imagination and the physical act of painting, they blur fact with fiction. 

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    The exhibition’s theatrical language is especially pronounced. Backstage Behavior sets a hectic town square populated by intertwined human and animal forms. Architectural elements suggest a constructed stage, and a figure appears to pass through a doorway whose boundaries coincide with those of the painted space. Renaissance-inspired clothing adds a historical, theatrical note, while the entangled bodies reflect Bengtsson’s sustained interest in anatomy and physical relationships. The scene becomes a place of exchange and transformation: information passes between individuals and is altered along the way, reflecting the exhibition’s broader interest in the instability of knowledge. Across the compositions, an accumulation of figures, objects, clothing, architectural fragments and gestures produces an overflow that remains deliberately difficult to decipher. 

     

    Piano Lesson (Steinway & Sons) takes inspiration from Matisse’s The Piano Lesson (1916). The instrument dominates the canvas, its interior displayed like a diagram and flattened into pattern, with figures arranged around and above it. The piano becomes its own stage, where scientific display, domestic scene and memory overlap. It sets the score for the exhibition: a structure of strings, intervals and repeated forms against which the other works can be read. Built up in fine line and washes of colour, the surface shows the same patience as the instrument’s own construction. 

     

    One Need Not Be A Chamber, its title borrowed from Emily Dickinson, shifts the stage-like setting of Bagatelle towards a backstage environment. A figure emerges through a door alongside a dog, surrounded by mechanical components, an ambiguous bone-like form and architectural structures. The intimacy between human and animal contrasts with the apparatus around them, reinforcing the exhibition’s movement between tenderness, observation and theatrical construction. 

     

    Squint begins with Viking Age burials, in which people could be laid to rest beside partners, animals and everyday possessions. Bengtsson brings that archaeological subject to life: figures, animals and objects tangle together and seem to push up out of the ground. Other sources seep in, so the scene belongs to no single historical moment. The circular format creates the sensation of peering through a hole, a lens or a pair of binoculars, and ties the work to the tondo and to circular religious painting. 

  • Architectural display extends beyond the paintings into a series of custom-built tables that occupy an ambiguous position between furniture, sculpture,...

    Architectural display extends beyond the paintings into a series of custom-built tables that occupy an ambiguous position between furniture, sculpture, archive, and painting support. Their angled surfaces recall both an architect’s drafting table and a medical dissecting table, while also evoking the beds used in operatic staging. The two paintings presented on these structures depict different versions of The Healing of the Paralytic at Capernaum, a biblical episode in which Christ instructs a paralysed man to rise, take up his bed, and leave. The angled supports thus acquire an additional theatrical and narrative dimension, connecting the paintings’ biblical imagery to the conventions of stage design. Mounted on legs and wheels, the structures retain a sense of mobility, as though they might be moved or rearranged at any moment. The paintings rest directly upon them, appearing suspended between the completion of the work and the act of its display. 

     

    Bagatelle presents painting as a space where fragments remain undiscovered: where bodies, histories and objects resist being fully reconstructed. Like relics, Bengtsson leaves these fragments suspended between what is known and what is imagined, inviting the viewer to inhabit the uncertainty between the two.

  • “I paint like an excavation. Plastic paint on canvas. The tip of the brush coating the fibers. Preserving and digging out form. Finding a subject that is in flux. Barely coherent. In the process of becoming or coming apart. Making it sticky. encapsulated. Figures with a stiff anatomy.  Digging out wooden spoons, splinters of a house. A germinal chaos. At a point of catastrophe or having undergone a calm death. All of them are made from grids. The grid is  the internet research and visual archives. Painting is talking with the grid as words. To say the words in new tonations, to muffle some words. To divide the words into sounds. Some loud, some whispers. Inaudible speech about a familiar subject. Painting like Klee’s gray point jumping beyond itself. Painting until it feels foreign to myself. Like a relic. Like a person painted like an object.  Our cultural and scientific history is held together by spit and glue. People steal the bricks from big churches to make their new driveway. DIY solutions to big problems. Cutting a toe off a big statue to fit it for shipment. To bend a form to fit it for the painting. I like that aesthetic diagrams are the easiest to remember. I like that fun facts are the easiest to remember. I paint what i think someone once told me. The echo of the original story put on tape.”  

     

    - Victor Bengtsson

  • Victor Bengtsson (b. 1997, Copenhagen) paints as a form of excavation. His work draws on archaeology and the logic of...

    Victor Bengtsson (b. 1997, Copenhagen) paints as a form of excavation. His work draws on archaeology and the logic of display, alongside music, scientific history and visual archives, which he substitutes with memory, anecdotes and invention. Figures, objects and settings appear caught between formation and disintegration, as future relics that seem to have been recovered from an uncertain time, or half-remembered from a story once told. Bengtsson’s works are a labyrinthine simulacrum: a maze of illusions filled with heavy archetypal symbols and figures that exude meaning, even as the rationale for their interconnectedness has fallen apart. 

     

    Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Albion Jeune, London (2026); Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen (2025); O-Overgaden, Copenhagen (2025); Public Gallery, London (2024); Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2023); Mendes Wood DM, online (2022); and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2021). Group exhibitions include dépendance, Brussels (2025); Public Gallery, London (2025); Someday Gallery, New York (2024); and Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2020). Bengtsson looks forward to forthcoming exhibitions in Sweden and New York (2027), and a major public commission in Denmark (2028). 

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