Ian Schjals is a Danish visual artist educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1984. Since the mid-1980s, he has been an active part of the Danish contemporary art scene, exhibiting early on at Galleri Jedig and Galleri Nørregade, which later became Stalke Galleri in 1987. His collaboration with the gallery continued through the 1990s and culminated in 2004 with a major exhibition together with the American artist Dove Bradshaw.
Schjals works in the intersection between painting, object, and materiality, where the elements of nature and geology – ground and mass – form both motif and method. His works revolve around time, layering, and transformation, and his visual language moves between organic abstraction and material minimalism. Color and surface play a central role, with cracks, fissures, and textures revealing a continuous process of deposition and change.
His practice is characterized by an investigative gaze, where a fascination with earth, planets, and the structures of the universe becomes a kind of modern alchemy. Schjals’ works can be seen as meditations on the materiality of existence – poetic spaces where time, nature, and humanity merge into one and the same movement.
See Ian Schjals exhibition in combination with Dove Bradshaw, 2004
The work reflects Schjals’ exploration of geological matter, surface texture, and the transformation of material through time, Stalke Galleri 2003