Souvanni Asmussen

About

Souvanni Asmussen is an artist with who works around nature and culture. In an eclectic mix of styles and codes, opposing references meet, from 80s airbrush, to modernism and art deco, in a tightly composed, ambiguous and humorous expression. The works are playful, teasing and festive, but at the same time contain an undertone of melancholy, mystery and longing.

She uses classic motifs such as the landscape and the body, but treats them as changeable and culturally shaped entities. The motifs are sometimes used playfully and with humor to challenge and question our perception.

Several of the works draw on optical illusions and reversible figures, which challenge our way of seeing, also through the use of material choices and alternating surfaces. At the same time, a clear focus on the aesthetic is maintained, where form, color and composition are central.

Through shifts and visual overlaps, the boundary between figure and background dissolves: the body can appear as landscape, and the landscape as a bodily form. This duality challenges the viewer’s gaze and invites other possible readings of the same work.

Souvanni Asmussen was raised in an artistic environment influenced by her father, Des Asmussen’s characteristic illustrations, and her mother, Fleur Brofos Asmussen’s graphic expression and flair for storytelling, which early formed the exposure of artistic practices in Souvanni’s life, and have since had a significant impact on the development of her visual and aesthetic expression.

With an education in design (The Royal danish Academy from 1986-1990) and a professional background as a stylist in the fashion and advertising world, Souvanni clearly draws on the visual and cultural identities of fashion. She works with elements such as staging, surface and gaze and translates these into an artistic practice that contains both an immediate aesthetic appeal and a reflective examination of, among other things, the depiction of women in history.

Her works balance between the stylistic and the analytical, where the focus on form and appearance is accompanied by an underlying ambiguity. This duality points to the fleeting and constructed in the visual expression and opens up for a more complex reading of the meaning of the images.

The female figure is created from a formal and visual dimension that is continuously transformed and enters into changing relationships. It is dissolved and rethought as an integral part of the overall structure of the image, with undertones of humor, perhaps inspired by her father’s lightness in his sensitive expression.

Souvanni creates her clearly defined art by pre-painting paper and cardboard, that she cuts into shapes. She will draw and make stencils, and colour with acrylics and oil pastels. Sometimes she uses fabric and even duckt tape.

Contact:

Souvanni Asmussen
+ 45 21 45 45 25

Dronningens Kovang 20
3480 Fredensborg
Denmark

e-mail : souvanni [at] souvanni.dk