Sune Christiansen Denmark, b. 1976

Sune Christiansen (b.1976, Copenhagen, Denmark) is a self-taught artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. His multidisciplinary approach spans painting, ceramics, and graphic works, with a growing international presence, with increasing representation in private and institutional collections across Europe and North America.

Sune Christiansen has developed a distinctive approach to figurative abstraction—both enigmatic and playful. His work, rich in expressive and vibrant colour, presents a distorted reality that invites the viewer to interpret freely and independently. While the figures in his paintings are given space to speak for themselves, Christiansen subtly touches on themes such as power dynamics, religious ritual, sexuality, and intimacy. What emerges is a raw, emotionally charged language that feels at once deeply personal and universally resonant.

A multi-disciplinary artist working across painting, ceramics, and printmaking, Christiansen’s practice is rooted in an ongoing exploration of material and form. In his paintings, bold, often crude strokes manipulate texture and density, with patches of exposed canvas allowed to interrupt the image. His process typically begins digitally, using an iPad to sketch and refine compositions before translating them onto canvas. Yet once he begins working with physical materials, the process becomes instinctive and tactile—an attempt to recreate, but also reinterpret, the energy of the original sketch through direct engagement with the surface.

Colour is central to Christiansen’s visual language. It is never purely decorative—instead, it acts as a force of mood and meaning. His palette moves between muddy earth tones and acid brights, creating unexpected harmonies and jarring dissonances. Sudden bursts of saturated pigment bring emotional intensity, while awkward, off-kilter juxtapositions heighten a sense of psychological tension. Christiansen uses colour as a tool to both anchor and disrupt the viewer’s reading, making sensation inseparable from form.

Through this interplay of figuration, materiality, and chromatic intensity, Christiansen crafts a visual language that resists easy definition. His work occupies a space between impulse and control, intuition and refinement—continually challenging how we engage with image-making today. Whether on canvas, in clay, or through print, his practice remains grounded in a deep commitment to process, one that privileges ambiguity, emotion, and the complexity of human experience.