“Leave Your Clothes at the Door” marks Norwegian-born, New York-based artist and designer Eleen Halvorsen’s first presentation of sculpture and painting. Conceived as a one-night-only exhibition and intimate launch event, the presentation signals a pivotal expansion beyond her acclaimed work in conceptual fashion and object-making. In this new chapter, Halvorsen deepens her ongoing exploration of the female body, sexuality, self-discovery, and expression, both on and beyond the body.
“The title ‘Leave Your Clothes at the Door’ can be read as a metaphor for vulnerability,” says Halvorsen. “Unveiling a new body of work feels nerve-wracking, yet freeing. In a way it feels like a coming-of-age moment in my art practice, a thrilling mix of innocence, danger, and liberation. Like a teenager speeding down a neighborhood street on her bike at dawn, no hands on the handlebars, on her way to meet a new lover, or the innocently dangerous tingling feeling of pleasure and something forbidden as tight jeans rubbing against a bike seat for the first time.”
The exhibition strips away the garments that have, until now, defined Halvorsen’s artistic language, revealing a raw evolution of form and material. In these new works, the female form takes center stage through a series of sensual, hand-sculpted figures in concrete and steel, left bare, rugged, and tactile, alongside large-scale monochromatic oil paintings in which the abstracted body becomes both subject and landscape, a vessel for emotion, memory, and transformation. Layers of paint evoke the softness of flesh and the shadow of gesture, their textures concealing and revealing elusive hints of the feminine figure.
ABOUT ELEEN HALVORSEN
Eleen Halvorsen is a New York-based Norwegian-born artist and designer working across different mediums spanning garment making, leatherwork, painting and sculpture. Halvorsen describes her process as one of deliberate opposition, an interplay between control and surrender, sensuality, and restraint. “There has to be a certain tension in my work,” she notes. “Whether it’s incorporating bodage elements into traditional tailoring, or juxtaposing traditionally masculine construction materials like concrete and steel with organically abstract bodies. I’m drawn to the raw feminine, the point where beauty, discomfort, and desire converge.” Through this new body of work, the artist invites viewers into her world from a new perspective: intimate, fearless, and deeply personal.
Eleen Halvorsen creates coveted pieces bridging art, high fashion and eroticism with a poetic underline. Through her interdisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, painting, garment making and leatherwork, Halvorsen explores themes of identity, self expression and sexuality, challenging conventional boundaries of femininity and the expectations placed upon the female body. Over the past decade, she has examined and shaped the notion of the body through what we wear, contemplating our psychological and emotional relationship to clothing as an extension of self. Her considered use of transformational materials such as leather and suiting, each charged with cultural, sexual, and gendered associations, tests the boundaries of perception and propriety, operating deliberately on the edge of fetishism.
Born and raised in Norway, Eleen Halvorsen moved to New York to attend Parsons The New School for Design, from where she graduated in 2012. Her works have been featured in Interview Magazine, L’Officiel, Numéro Tokyo, SCHÖN!, Contributor Magazine, StyleZeitgeist, S Magazine, and The Huffington Post, among others.
Photos: Courtesy of Eleen Halvorsen
www.eleenhalvorsen.com
@eleenhalvorsen
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