Copenhagen
ALICE FOLKER GALLERY
On now
- Solo exhibition by Tarek Lakhrissi Exhibition text by Sif Lindblad I first came across the work of Tarek Lakhrissi in a group show at Maison Populaire in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, in 2020. I'm from nowhere good, it was called, and considered queer artistic practices as political propositions that might allow for other potential futures. I remember walking through the exhibition with a feeling of having caught a glimpse of what was to come. Like this was the way forward for the world, to become a bit more strange, tender, funny. It offered an invitation to share in some of the tools and practices that have come to be known as queer. Which is to say that there are ways of imagining and inhabiting the world otherwise. This is, in many ways, what I continue to recognize in Tarek Lakhrissi's work. dreamboy is the artist's first show in Denmark, and thereby also a step onto unknown ground. Even more so because it is the first time Lakhrissi is showing a larger series of his drawings. Returning to drawing after giving it up as a teenager-when drawing, for a boy, was associated with something he was then meant to feel ashamed of-means returning to something he loves. His dreamboy drawings hold pride and a love for youth, pleasure and fairy-tale-like happy endings. They are populated by different versions of the dreamboy: men, monsters, lovers, happy devils, characters that seem to evolve from one drawing to the next, like a Pokémon developing through different stages, moving freely between the everyday, images found on Tumblr and references to art history and pop culture. Those in the first room are all portraits, a new dreamboy daydreaming in his own private space. The perspective is slightly off, and the boys all pose in different ways, doing their own thing, as if we were secretly peeking in on them or looking at a still from a movie. They all look gentle, put together, just doing their (weird) thing. In the second room, the drawings, and the dreamboys inhabiting them, become more quirky, dreamy, kinky. I've seen that face before leans towards the almost surreal, a flicker of unconscious scenes that appear in the depths of sleep. A paper cut-out with a hand holding a peach or an apple seems loaded with references: still-life painting, religious temptation, the peach that loses its innocence in Call Me by Your Name. In Orgies and comets, a sphinx-like pose nods to archaic art-historical imagery, alongsideDescription
Tarek Lakhrissidreamboy
Until 5 Nov 2026
Recent past exhibitions
- Catherine Anholt, a late sixties artist, is exhibiting her work in a solo show titled 'The Love and the Pain'. The exhibition will run from August 21 to September 25, 2026. Born with 98% Irish DNA, Catherine grew up in a rambling cottage near Stroud in Gloucestershire, escaping into nature with her artist's materials. She studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Royal College of Art, qualifying with a First-Class Honours Degree and receiving the Rome Scholarship. Alongside her artistic practice, Catherine has written and illustrated over 200 children's books with her husband Laurence Anholt. Their daughter Maddy, an olive-skinned beauty with relentless positivity, energy, and humor, passed away in 2023 after a brief illness following the birth of her daughter Opal. Catherine's current work is a testament to the healing power of art, pouring her grief and love into her paintings, often writing letters and poems directly into the canvas. This exhibition is a culmination of Catherine's courageous and defiant artistic journey, inspired by her universal story of love and pain.Description
Catherine Anholt : The Love and the Pain
Ended 25 Sept 2026
- My installations are approximations of the feeling of entering a dreamscape. Dreams know no boundaries: they magnify or diminish things, distort them, or pull you inside them. Sometimes they appear as sounds or fleeting images. I never write them down, new ones come all the time anyway. There is no hierarchy between night dreams, daydreams, or night terrors; they exist even though I fear some of these states. I can't help daydreaming. I just sit there on the train and start laughing. My partner knows this, so he looks at me and asks me what I'm thinking about. He can tell when I'm lying, so I just tell him the truth, even when it's somehow lame. I might be imagining a six-meter-long recorder. Or wondering what would happen if I sawed brass instruments apart and reassembled them using radiator fittings, turning standardized objects into modular ones. Listening to intuitions. As the American conceptual artist Adrian Piper wrote in 1996: "It seemed that the more clearly and abstractly I learned to think, the more clearly I was able to hear my gut telling me what I needed to do, and the more pressing it became to do it." How does one listen to the gut? Would you have to tear out the gut and create strings to mount on a violin and play them in order to hear it? Listening to the gut is about responding to the body, to something that insists before it can be explained. I think of this as being close to the logic of dreams. Dreams do not argue for themselves. They simply present something: an image, a sound, a strange connection between things that should not belong together. It feels necessary, it sometimes even feels more real than reality itself. Flutes are part of the cultural perception of magical objects...Description
Ragnhild May : More Real than Reality
Ended 17 Apr 2026
- A big letter with small expectations Anna Stahn's series of works consisting of letter sculptures, reliefs, and leporellos revolves around exchanges, friendships, and nostalgia. The letter in the envelope, addressed to a loved one or a friend, is an outdated technology which - even though postal systems in many places are being replaced by digitalized processes - we still recognize as something particularly intimate. Perhaps only for a few more generations, before the icon fades away or transforms into a memory of a slower time. From the small glimpses of text in the letters, we sense sentences about creation: creating oneself through clothing, style, fan culture, pop and punk culture, and creating and reflecting oneself through friendship. As expressed in the titular work The first attempt at making something together was dressing up and make-believe, the works are a tribute to the urge to create before it was concretized, economized, and systematized. The works explore the idea of "falling under the spell together" in encounters with music, political movements, counterculture, glamour, and art. About small attempts to express oneself, similar to practicing drawing or learning to navigate the worlds of art and emotions. Like a youthful drama in a glass of water, or a simple experience that over time is polished, gilded, and magnified into something legendary, the letters are enlarged into something like pop-art icons: a tribute to the nostalgia of friendship and its transformative potential. Exhibition text by Anna Stahn The series of works was originally created for the exhibition Venskaber at Sophienholm Kunsthal, 2025-2026.Description
Anna Stahn : The first attempt at making something together was dressing up and make-believe
Ended 17 Apr 2026