Oliver Bak | Indipendenza

18 Oct – 17 Jan 2026

Indipendenza is pleased to announce Swarmers, a solo exhibition by the artist Oliver Bak. The exhibition is the outcome of a creative process that combines the artist’s work in Copenhagen with a residency in Italy, which began in Tarquinia at the Matta Archives and concluded at Indipendenza in Rome. During this experience, Oliver Bak created a new series of twelve previously unseen oil and wax on canvas works, presented alongside a selection of drawings, also previously unseen. The exhibition unfolds within the apartment, weaving its way among terrazzo floors, painted ceilings, and period wallpaper. The exhibition will be on view until January 17, 2026.

“From a remote northern kingdom and the former studio of a surrealist maestro in the outskirts of a nearby Etruscan village, Oliver Bak‘s paintings have swarmed into Indipendenza, in the attic of a Roman palazzo, close to the train station. Up the broad stairs, or by the old creaking elevator, they crept into the decaying building, weaving through faded wallpaper, shaky floors, and peeling walls. They brought with them the characters that haunt them – dancers, ghosts, moths and butterflies, rubberists, chrysalises… A common theme in these migrating paintings is movement, whether physical, art-historical (Bilderfahrzeuge, or ‘image vehicles,’ Aby Warburg would say), or abstract. Their parasitic subjects always move, or have moved, across the canvas, sometimes swarming in from the outside. They dance (a danse macabre, though), walk in line, climb and descend stairs (mercifully, a dancer replaced the exhausted duchampian nu), plummet from above, and, lying down, rise from the ground. From the depth of the canvas, they are still pushing through layers of paint toward the painting’s surface, as close as possible to the dusty space that hosts them, their supports, and their viewers. Like termites or woodworms, they swarm in groups, in space, to breathe fresh air for a moment, before slipping back into the darkness of the painting. Take a look before they vanish.”

Indipendenza
Via dei Mille, 6, 00185 Rome

Indipendenza
Via dei Mille
Roma