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.
His practice began with the surfboard-derived "log" paintings of 2012, made through DIY board-shaping and sanding processes borrowed from auto body work. Sanding became a metaphor for weathering and erosion, and a critique of the artificial structures that manufacture value through speculation. From there he moved into sculpture: PET bottles reshaped into miniature Greek amphoras, collapsing ancient form into throwaway modernity, and silver-plated DIY rain gauges titled Trophies I Never Won—prizes for the environmental action we failed to take.
Øvlisen has also embraced the traditional materials he once avoided, using their cultural weight deliberately rather than rejecting it. He cast the plastic detritus of his children's early years—floaties, slippers, a beach ball—directly in bronze to mark the passing of that time, and set oil-painted seagulls into suspended 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.
