89. Emeli Theander - One day you find your ocean

2026
Oil on canvas
18 x 13 x 1.5 cm
Signed on Verso

Emeli Theander is an artist working across painting and drawing whose practice explores liminal psychological spaces where memory, mythology and dream intersect. Through hybrid figurative forms and shifting symbolic imagery, she creates works that resist fixed interpretation, balancing tension, vulnerability and instability. Her paintings inhabit fluid territories where distinctions between nature and culture, shelter and exposure, and stability and dissolution become increasingly uncertain.

Theander describes her work as an attempt to tame and contain the wild and uncanny — constructing spaces in which emotional states that evade easy categorisation can exist within controlled frameworks. Her paintings function like psychological landscapes or “mental safaris”, where untamed forces are given temporary form and rest. Through this interplay between control and surrender, the works evoke fragile interior worlds shaped by transformation, ambiguity and unease.

She studied Fine Art at the Berlin University of the Arts between 2006 and 2011 under Valérie Favre, before becoming a master student there from 2011 to 2012.

Selected solo exhibitions include Cronenberg’s Garden (duo with Aline Schwörer) at SomoS (2025); À la source (duo with Maldo Nollimerg) at Galerie DYS (2023); Baltic Sea & More (duo with Eglé Vismanté) at Espace à Vendre (2022); Feed Your Demons at Framed (2021); Vivid Vacation at Hoorn & Reniers (2019); and A Pit Full of Ghosts at Galerie DYS (2018).

Selected group exhibitions include Echo at Dorothea Konwiarz Stiftung (2025); Hopscotch at Bonian Space (2024); The Winter Auction with Art on a Postcard (2024); Summer of the Snake at Galerie DYS (2024); Dream Keepers at Galeria Szydlowski (2024); Luxembourg Art Week with Galerie DYS (2022); and Doing Identity – Die Sammlung Reydan Weiss at Kunstmuseum Bochum (2017–2018).

Her awards and residencies include runner-up in the Jackson's Art Prize, winner of the Delphian Open Call, a grant from the Dorothea Konwiarz Stiftung (2014–2015), and a six-month residency at Platoon Kunsthalle in 2010. Her work is held in collections including the Sammlung Reydan Weiss and the SØR Rusche Sammlung Oelde/Berlin.