“For me, the title (Evighetens Skog) creates a

mental clearing where I can wander and allow my

imagination and intuition to roam freely. I enjoy

being there, in the clearing where nothing but my

own imagination holds sway, where my own logic

and my own laws of nature are free to exist.”

Larsen / Warner is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of new work by the Swedish artist Ludvig Helin. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery and follows on from his inclusion in the group exhibition Under the Harvest Moon which opened at the gallery earlier this year. 

There has been a renewed interest in experimental modes of landscape painting in recent years. Helin, alongside other artists of his generation such as Freya Douglas - Morris, Benjamin Sledsens, Shara Hughes and Camilla Engström to name just a few, has created an expressive mode of landscape painting that builds on and expands the painterly traditions of both representation and abstraction. Presenting new paintings and works on paper, Evighetens Skog / The Forest of Eternity sees Helin continuing to radically experiment with the known tropes of landscape traditions, skilfully creating paintings that embody their own contradictions and play with the audience’s perception of both fact and imagination. 

In his new body of work, Helin explores painting as a means of approaching experiences that resist verbal articulation. His paintings inhabit an uncertain territory between recognition and estrangement, where familiar environments and objects appear subject to subtle distortions. Although these worlds retain traces of the reality we inhabit, their internal logic remains elusive. Perspectives shift, plants and trees assume unfamiliar qualities creating a lush botanical tapestry whose laws governing these worlds seem to diverge from those of the everyday. The viewer is invited to navigate a space in which meaning remains illusive and just out of reach.

The notion of the forest of eternity, which informs the exhibition’s title, can be understood as an imaginative landscape rather than a place defined by physical geography. For Helin, it evokes a mental clearing in which intuition and imagination are permitted to move beyond the constraints of established logic. Here, the artist’s own laws of nature take precedence, allowing unfamiliar relations and possibilities to emerge resulting in the luscious worlds Helin creates. 

The exhibition has a particular affinity with the literary universe of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård, especially his Morning Star series and the novel The Wolves of Eternity, which Helin read while developing the works in the exhibition. There are no comparisons or pretensions of creating in relation to his texts, but they provide a fertile space for Helin’s imagination to inhabit. 

Helin’s paintings do not seek to illustrate philosophical questions or offer answers to them. Instead, Helin creates painterly conditions in which uncertainty can be experienced directly, through the encounter between image and viewer. Between the literary and the visual, the everyday and the inexplicable, the composed and the alien, Helin pursues painting as a way of giving form to an experience that ultimately exceeds representation: the feeling of being left without words.

Ludvig Helin (b. 1988, Norsesund, Sweden) lives and works in Alingsås. He was a graduate of the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in 2016. Recent exhibitions include Blomma blomma at Galleri Hammarén, Gothenburg (2025), Apans Sång at GSA Gallery, Stockholm (2025), and Under the Harvest Moon (2026) at Larsen / Warner (2026), Helin’s work is also featured in Region Stockholm’s Konstväxlingar programme at Gärdet metro station. His work is represented in public collections including Region Sörmland, Region Uppsala, Umeå Municipality and Uddevalla Municipality. Among his distinctions are the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s Assistant Scholarship (2018) and the Vera and Göran Agnekil Scholarship for Young Artists (2019)