On Thomas Øvlisen, 2024
Thomas Øvlisen makes work that turns overlooked, discarded objects into meditations on memory, value, and consumption. By pairing found materials—PET plastic, shopping bags, ping pong tabletops—with traditionally prized processes like bronze casting, he questions the hierarchies that decide what counts as valuable in contemporary art.
Øvlisen also embraces the traditional materials of high culturally established value using their weight deliberately rather than rejecting it. Casting the plastic detritus of his children's early years—floaties, slippers, a beach ball—directly in bronze, he marked the passing of that era, and suspended oil-painted seagulls on abstracted landscapes painted on ping pong tables, folding landscape painting into the readymade.
Running through it all is an attention to the mundane: the conviction that small, everyday encounters can carry as much emotional and transformative weight as major life events. Øvlisen asks viewers to reconsider how worth is assigned—not only to materials, but to the stories and ideas they hold.
