Astri Styrkestad Haukaas’s practice is rooted in an exploration of the deeply interconnected relationship between humanity and the natural world. Through her paintings, she creates visual and emotional landscapes that traverse themes of memory, impermanence, and transformation. Inspired by the raw forces of nature—stones dislodged from mountains, rivers carving new paths, and the endless dance between destruction and renewal—her work becomes a meditation on what it means to exist as part of something much larger than ourselves.
Haukaas’s process is one of collaboration with her materials. Each piece evolves through a dynamic interplay of intention and chance, echoing the natural tension between control and surrender. In her new exhibition, Today I Can’t See the Mountains but I Know They Are There, familiar elements—mountains, waterfalls, rivers—emerge and dissolve, shifting into dreamlike forms that feel both intimately known and newly imagined. We are invited not just to look, but to sense: to notice the subtle transitions between light and dark, solidity and flow, memory and presence.
Much of Haukaas’s work is informed by her deep connection to landscapes, both those she has walked through physically and those she has traversed emotionally. Her paintings become spaces of encounter, where time and space are set into motion, and where new, fragile zones open between the inner and outer world. Whether reflecting on the overwhelming presence of nature in remote places or its poignant absence in urban life, her practice becomes an ongoing dialogue about longing, loss, and belonging.
At the heart of Astri Styrkestad Haukaas’s work is a profound questioning of humanity’s role within nature. Her paintings do not simply depict landscapes—they enact a way of being within them. They ask us to pause, to reflect on our own ways of sensing and shaping the world, and to consider how the landscapes within us are always shifting, always becoming. By drawing on literary influences such as Rebecca Solnit and Donna Haraway, as well as philosophical reflections on impermanence and interconnectedness, Haukaas’s work transcends the visual to engage with larger existential questions.
In her spaces, forms blur and reassemble, waterfalls run backward, mountains collapse into shadow, and what once felt fixed is set adrift. Through this lens, her practice becomes a space of quiet, transformative contemplation—a reminder that we are, and always will be, part of nature’s enduring cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
Fakta
Astri Styrkestad Haukaas (b. 1986, Norway) is a visual artist working across different media working and living in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Kilde:
Wild Horses gallery
Wild Horses gallery