VICTOR BENGTSSON

TOWN SQUARES

03/04-31/05-2025

Victor Bengtsson

Town Squares
April - 31. May 2025

Andersen’s is pleased to introduce the first solo exhibition in the gallery by Danish artist Victor Bengtsson.

In the exhibition Town Squares, we enter a town square overflowing with delicious market goods and merchants, all offering themselves in an intricate tangle of hats, bells, fresh fish, and strings of sausages. A single sentence is whispered from one merchant to another. It is passed along to the next person, and the next. Little by little, the story changes—facts and narratives blur, giving life to humorous and imaginative interpretations and fantasies.

As a continuation of Bengtsson’s exhibition Horse Droppings Are Not Figs, presented at O - Overgaden from February to May 2025, Town Squares at Andersen’s focuses on how narratives and reconstructions of events and "facts" become increasingly distorted as they move further from their original source. Ultimately, new stories emerge from a chit-chatting crowd—stories that are more fiction than fact. We experience it on todays’ digital "town square” like Twitter/X, where utterances and statements spins around in a turbulent carousel of true and false and end in brain rot and a flat earth.

For Town Squares Bengtsson has created six new large scale and three smaller paintings using his unique technique of applying color to hessian embedding motifs into the fabric’s rough texture.

Scientific methods plays a great part of Bengtsson’s artistic practice as the artists delves into posthumanist medical theory, particularly focusing on the future of hybrid human and nonhuman bodies. His paintings capture the grotesque and the magical as states of metamorphosis, where all bodies are in the act of becoming.
Bengtsson’s works are a labyrinthine simulacrum — a maze of illusions filled with heavy archetypes and figures that exude meaning, even as the rationale for their interconnectedness has fallen apart. The artist intends for his paintings to become surreal future relics, artifacts that claim to describe known phenomena but exist in a context that feels otherworldly or out of time.

Victor Bengtsson (b. 1997, DK) is a self-taught artist with a BA in medicine (2019-2023), Bengtsson lives and works in Copenhagen. He has exhibited at Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo, 2021, New York, 2022, Brussels, 2023); Public Gallery, London (2024); East Contemporary Gallery, Milan (2021), Someday Gallery, NYC (2024) and O - Overgaden in Copenhagen, Denmark (2025).

Photo: Malle Madsen