In a time when images circulate faster than experience, and where reality is often encountered through screens, algorithms, and headlines, Lena Trydal (b. 1994, Kristiansand) examines the role of painting as both mirror and resistance. Her figurative works draw on the visual language of pop and internet culture, where memes, political icons, celebrities, and digital aesthetic codes merge seamlessly into one another.

Trydal’s visual language is closely tied to digital references and the collective aesthetics of the present. Motifs and figures often appear as both intimate and iconic, caught in a liminal space between individual and avatar, original and copy. The paintings point to how identity and power are not only constructed through language and politics, but also through images: through which faces are repeated, which narratives are amplified, and which visual codes become normative. Trydal does not merely paint the images of the present; she paints the way the present sees.

In the solo exhibition Tell Me What I Want to Hear, Trydal engages with international politics, popular culture, and power dynamics as concurrent visual regimes. The title can be read as an imperative—a demand for confirmation and loyalty—but also as an expression of affective vulnerability: a desire for comforting narratives within a fragmented and information-saturated public sphere. Between these poles, a space emerges in which Trydal’s paintings operate—a space where irony, ambivalence, and critique coexist with humor and visual seduction. Within this tension between authority and longing, the works articulate a critique of contemporary media logic, where truth is often subordinated to the attention economy and affective resonance.