Henrik Simonsen: Recent Works
Findlay Galleries Palm Beach
Exhibition Details
Henrik Simonsen: Recent Works
Findlay Galleries
April 17 – May 29, 2026
Monday–Saturday, 10 AM – 6 PM
Location: Findlay Galleries, Palm Beach, USA
At Findlay Galleries, Henrik Simonsen: Recent Works unfolds as a meditation on perception—where landscape is no longer something observed, but something felt. The exhibition presents a new body of paintings that expand Simonsen’s long-standing dialogue with nature, pushing it toward a more immersive and sensorial register.
Simonsen’s practice begins with drawing, yet what emerges on canvas transcends line. His compositions dissolve into layered atmospheres where color takes precedence over form. In these recent works, chromatic intensity becomes the driving force: saturated hues pulse across the surface, generating a visual rhythm that oscillates between structure and spontaneity.
Botanical references appear not as illustrations, but as fleeting presences—forms that surface, fragment, and recombine. Leaves, stems, and organic patterns are suggested rather than defined, existing in a state of transformation. This fluidity situates the work between abstraction and memory, where the natural world is reconfigured through intuition.
What distinguishes Simonsen’s approach is his ability to balance a restrained Nordic sensibility with expressive freedom. There is a quiet discipline underlying the exuberance of color—a compositional intelligence that prevents the work from collapsing into chaos. Instead, each painting becomes a field of tension between control and release, observation and invention.
In Recent Works, nature is not depicted as a fixed reality, but as an evolving experience. Light, rhythm, and movement replace traditional representation, inviting the viewer into an environment that feels both familiar and elusive. These paintings do not ask to be read; they ask to be entered.
On Worth Avenue, amid the polished architecture of Palm Beach, Simonsen’s work introduces a different kind of space—one that is immersive, unstable, and alive. It is here, within these shifting fields of color, that landscape becomes not a place, but a condition of perception.
Artist Statement
My work has had nature as a central theme for years. There is a lesson to learn from how nature is able to vary simple forms infinite. I think this is where my Scandinavian background becomes evident. Scandinavia has a long tradition for art, design and architecture inspired by natural forms. For me personally the draw of the subject matter is its inexhaustible richness and metaphorical ability to speak of human existence. Of life, passion and the brevity of existence.
Like the subject matter the process of creating them is an organic process where the elements are allowed to ‘grow’ onto the canvas. The first mark will suggest others and in this way I will move around the canvas until it is completed. The canvas will have washed off paint poured onto it and oil paint applied to it. There is no set order to the process above and any of them can be repeated a number of times. I feel this gives the painting a feel of having occupied a period in time because the layers allow the history of creation to be visible rather then reducing the piece to just an impenetrable surface.
I paint all elements freehand. I do not use stencils or projectors.
I have been asked why I paint with such vivid colours, when such colours are rarely found in nature. My reply is that if I painted nature like it appears, I would not be painting it as it feels to me.
