Visual Artist
Artist Statement – Elísabet Olka
I am an Icelandic artist based in Copenhagen, working across painting, drawing, sculpture, plaster, and clay. My practice is rooted in material exploration—blending diverse techniques to create works that are both poetic and tactile. I move fluidly between abstraction and figuration, allowing form, texture, and emotion to guide the process.
In recent projects, I have focused on creating small, hand-painted ceramic tiles, assembling them into cohesive visual montages. These fragmented surfaces come together to form new, layered narratives—each piece a meditation on memory, transformation, and continuity.
Much of my work draws on the human figure and psychological states, tracing inner journeys, inherited stories, and intergenerational experience. Through drawing and painting, I attempt to give form to emotions that are often felt but not easily named.
In parallel, I create dreamlike, abstract drawings that aim to capture fleeting sensory impressions—moments suspended between memory and emotion. These works exist in the space between the personal and the collective, the physical and the imagined
In my most recent works, I work with handmade ceramic tiles, each individually painted and assembled into a poetic, painterly whole. Fragments form new narratives rather than a single linear story. Inspired by literature and philosophy, I explore how spaces and everyday objects carry experience, care, and memory, and how time emerges as layered rather than linear.
CV
Elísabet Olka * Reykjavik, Iceland
Lives and works in Copenhagen
2001-2004 BFA in Fine Arts, Iceland University of the Arts, Reykjavík, Iceland
Exhibitions
2026
Emerging Moments with Ingunn Fjóla Ingþórsdóttir, Davis Gallery, Copenhagen Denmark
2025
Winther show, Davis Gallery, Copenhagen Denmark
Summerexhibition, Davis Gallery, Copenhagen Denmark
Montage, Wild Horses Gallery , Copenhagen, Denmark
Metamophorse Embassy of Iceland, Copenhagen, Denmark
2024
Floral Affairs DesignMarch, Stefánsbúð, Reykjavík, Iceland
Phenomenon Gallery. DesignMarch, Reykjavik Iceland
2023
Poetic Rum. Culture Night, Stefánsbúð, Reykjavík, Iceland
2022
My Eye is Like a Leaf ( Auga mitt er lauf) Listval Gallery, Reykjavík, Iceland
Christmas Show. Listval, Reykjavík, Iceland
2020
Jønshus. Museum, Copenhagen Denmark
