Niklas Asker: The Shroud

In The Shroud, his first solo exhibition in the United States, Swedish artist Niklas Asker explores the excavation of memory and spirituality. By dissecting images from art history and secular texts and distilling their meaning and reference points down to their most basic visual elements, Asker obscures their original forms through a combination of abstraction and figuration that seemingly lifts his subjects off their canvases like reliefs. The title of the exhibition subversively acts as a nod to the Shroud of Turin, the cloth that is said to have covered the body of Jesus after his crucifixion and death—Asker’s technique of shrouding and covering leaves viewers with vague hints at his original references.

Asker’s practice has shifted as he became interested in painting less literal images in an attempt to step away from narrative and move towards an emotional essence, while still utilizing the representational techniques in which he was trained. This, combined with Asker’s interest in art historical portrayals of the sacred and divine, compelled him to research early Christian oil paintings. Asker is not particularly interested with Christianity itself, but instead how artists through the ages have translated what they felt was godly into image form––the choice of subjects, composition, and lighting that instill a painting with a sacred tone. In this current body of work, Asker removes specific dogmatic elements from the equation to try to understand how we as humans express the feeling of something larger than ourselves, something incomprehensible, yet omnipresent and meaningful. 

The Shroud combines figurative works that borrow from Western traditions of portraiture, still lifes, and larger pieces that utilize the concept of the shroud translated into a visual format. These pieces often begin with a reference to a sculpture or image that Asker then transforms and obscures through different digital processes, while two-dimensional drawings and paintings are transformed into reliefs. These reliefs are then used as a reference point for Asker’s paintings, bouncing back and forth between art history to the digital world and back again. Asker views this process as a means to examine how many elements in an image he can carve away without removing the core emotion of the piece. Almost as by consumption, he takes ownership of these images through this practice of dissection and recreation, allowing the artist to experience them in an intense yet intimate way, learning about their inherently devotional qualities he seeks to tease out in his final paintings. 

Inspired by the work of artists such as Anish Kapoor, Auguste Rodin, Berlinde De Bruyckere, and Victor Man, Asker seeks to convey spirituality without using overtly religious thematics. For Asker, these artists’ practices are imbued with a charge that evokes the same feeling as entering a church or other holy space. Though rather than being tied to any specific belief system or faith, Asker is interested in how works of art can stir a sense of awe in a viewer, while moving steadily between abstraction and recognizable forms.