Oliver Bak on paintings that grow in the dark

It was a cold, dark winter in Copenhagen. At worst, painter Oliver Bak’s studio, located in a 1990s office block in the city, was getting less than seven hours of greyish, overcast light each day. In these conditions, he spent months working on the four paintings that now hang in the front gallery of Sprüth Magers in London. As a group, their working title was Night Sprouts. “If you’re painting the way I am, it’s a bit like growing paintings,” he says. These ones grew in the dark.

Opal (2024) hangs in the window. It’s a canvas that has clearly been through a lot. Bak’s painting-growing involves working them up in many layers, and this one’s truly encrusted. Oil paint, which he mixes with wax, is pitted with raised spots and the occasional bristle, plucked from a paintbrush by the thick mixture. A supine body extends across it, thin-limbed with the round head of an embryo. It looks like it’s fading away, growing transparent as it dissipates into a shroud of greyish haze. It looks up to the (naturally, dark) sky with an ambivalent and barely discernible expression.

Bak is joined by an impressive list of artists including Enrico David, Leonor Fini and Anne Imhof in a group show called ‘Songs before Sunrise’. We speak in a room a few floors above it. He tells me that he’s often inspired by historical artists and writers, whose work serves as “some kind of starting point to get the machine running.” The title Opal comes from a line written by the French poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. “Jeg er indeni en opal,” it reads in Danish; “I am opal inside,” Bak translates for me. Gilbert-Lecomte died, addicted to morphine, from an infected needle. “I imagine him in a bed in Paris, almost floating in some way, floating in his mind,” Bak says, “I was trying to get some way with that feeling or to show that atmosphere.”

I tell him that I feel an aura of peaceful resignation emanating from the painting, though I can’t explicitly place it within its scratched and overworked surface. “It’s the same for me,” he says.

Many successful artists don’t have time for mysteries like this. They talk about their work quickly and succinctly. They’ve refined their angle and are ready to regurgitate it to gallerists, critics and collectors. “I paint A, which represents B”, they might say; or “I use X process to reflect Y idea.” Bak isn’t like this. He speaks slowly, choosing his words carefully. I get the sense that he’s working things out as we speak, trying to bridge a gap between the enigmatic content of his paintings and what can be said about them in words. When he gets close, his eyes light up and his diction becomes faster. It’s refreshing.

Though most of them end up almost invisible, working in layers over a long period is important to Bak. “This thing with overpainting and overworking, perhaps it doesn’t always make sense to do that, but it’s needed for me to accept the work. It needs to have had that life and that feeling that you can see underneath,” he says. Indeed, you will occasionally glimpse spectral figures, barely visible behind the layers that have been painted over them. In the trunk of The Laughing Tree (2025), for example, just-discernible pale faces from an almost-forgotten layer lend a ghostly, surreal quality. “I like to think that they are part of the work, things that happened before and disappeared,” explains Bak, “it’s very much like a collage of dreams.”

It’s a seductive story: the painter working in the dead of Nordic winter on obscure, poetry-inspired paintings that contain phantom forms and hidden layers. Career-wise, Bak is doing very well. Last year he joined the roster of Sprüth Magers alongside heavy-hitters including Barbara Kruger and George Condo. Born in 1992, he’s their youngest artist. In 2023, this very magazine included him in a feature on a buzzy group of artists dubbed “rusty painters”. A cynic might ask whether he really is so different from those elevator-pitchable artists that the market and media tend to favour, but I doubt that what Bak’s telling me is an inauthentic mythology concocted to bring about such success.

He’s certainly not churning out work as quickly and efficiently as most market darlings. “It’s a very frustrating process to make the paintings,” he admits, “There will always be a lot of dissatisfaction. You never know how fast they’ll come.” Often, he regrets painting over a good layer, wondering why he felt compelled to take a perfectly decent painting further. Outside the studio, ideas for unfinished paintings follow him around like a shadow. By the time he’s in front of the canvas, they’ve often disappeared.

Such tribulations are made up for by the moments when something clicks into place and a painting begins to hum: “Sometimes, you have this really fantastic feeling that’s like, ‘wow, something happened there.’ You can feel that in your stomach.” I know the feeling when an image, phrase or melody almost vibrates with an immense sense of significance. To me, that’s the best thing that art can do. I’m just surprised to learn that, in Bak’s case, it comes about to the artist as mysteriously as it does to me as a viewer. Do the frustrating moments outnumber these glimpses of near-divine clarity? “If it wasn’t like that, there would be more paintings,” he says.

Towards the end of our conversation, I ask Bak whether the success that he’s experiencing motivates him. After spending almost an hour in the weeds of his magical-seeming painting process, the question feels gauche. It’s followed by a long pause. “Of course I care,” he says, “but it will always be the same process.” He wasn’t producing any more or fewer paintings five years ago, and his way of making them is just as labyrinthine now as it was then.

Some things don’t change. Though his paintings now hang in the window of one of London’s best-respected galleries, looking out onto the opulent pantomime that is Mayfair, his studio practice remains the same as it ever was: always mysterious and often frustrating. It’s not a bad job though, he says, so long as it’s approached with the right attitude: “You’ve got to be optimistic about it, that there’s a way that it will turn out in the end.”