Holiday dinners in white plastic chairs, holiday braids, flashing neon signs, beer glasses, and feet bathed in the glow of sunset. Arguineguín, named after the holiday resort on Gran Canaria, takes as its point of departure vacation photographs from Syden, sourced from both the internet and the artist’s personal image archive. The motifs are closely connected to the artist’s own experiences of growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, while also extending beyond the individual toward a broader, collective image bank.

By foregrounding this aesthetic, the exhibition invites reflection on class, taste, and belonging within the art world. What is considered a worthy subject for painting? Which images are assigned value, and which are dismissed?

Lena Trydal’s artistic practice often begins with images and objects that exist on the margins of the art world’s established hierarchies of taste. Stock photography, internet images, tourist motifs, souvenirs, and other forms of visual culture often perceived as banal, sentimental, or kitsch provide the basis for investigations into how cultural value is created and negotiated. What these motifs share is that they frequently hold great emotional significance for the people who use them, while simultaneously being assigned low cultural status.

Through figurative painting, such images are placed in dialogue with an art historical tradition that has itself helped define which subjects are considered meaningful. Painting thus functions not only as representation, but also as a method for examining the relationship between taste, identity, desire, and value. The works move between the personal and the collective, between private memories and images that already circulate as cultural clichés.

The paintings are based on material drawn from the internet and the artist’s own archives, which are combined through digital collages before being translated into paint. This working method makes it possible to juxtapose different visual languages, symbols, and ideas, while revealing how images shape our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us.

Together, the paintings create an environment in which nostalgia, irony, and critique flow into one another—a place where the surface of the holiday idyll is both sustained and allowed to crack.

The exhibition is supported by Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond (BKV) and Fritt Ord

Lena Trydal (f. 1994 i Kristiansand) arbeider med figurative malerier med utgangspunkt i pop- og internettkultur. Hun har en bachelorgrad i Estetiske Studier fra Universitetet i Oslo og har studert billedkunst ved the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (Haag, Nederland) og Metàfora (Barcelona, Spania). I 2022 deltok hun i Nasjonalmuseets åpningsutstilling «Jeg kaller det kunst», hvor hennes satiriske portrett av den norske kongefamilien skapte kontrovers. Hun har tidligere stilt ut ved blant annet K-U-K Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst, Trondheim (2026) Mikey Laundry Art Garden, Bergen (2025), IRL Gallery New York (2024), KÖSK, Oslo (2024), Søgne Gamle Prestegård (2024), Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling i Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, København (2021 & 2023), Statens kunstutstilling, Høstutstillingen på Kunstnernes Hus (2022), Arteriet, Kristiansand (2018) og Roodkapje Rot(t)terdam, Nederland (2015). Verk av Trydal er innkjøpt av Nasjonalmuseet og Equinors kunstprogram.