MODLYS

Oil on canvas, signed by the artist on the front and backside – 2024 The painting is mounted with a black floating frame.

RAINSCAPES

When it rains, I jump in the car and drive around, collecting photographic material. Like a hunter, I set out without knowing what kind of prey I’ll return with, until I review the footage. It’s a treasure hunt.

Leading up to my exhibition ROAD in 2012 at Sophienholm and Silkeborg Bad, I conducted extensive research. I mounted a camera in my car window and gathered 18,000 photographs from a road trip through Scandinavia. It rained a lot on that trip, and when I got home, I regrettably discarded all the images with raindrops on the windshield, using only the others.

A few years later, I pulled out the rejected photos and became captivated by the abstraction that appeared in the images when the rain had dissolved the view.

I’m a great admirer of the German artist Gerhard Richter, who brings deep sensuality to his motifs by using layers of blur in his paintings. That remains a constant source of inspiration. In these raindrops, I found my own path—and that became the Rainscapes series.

In my Rainscapes, the blurred landscape seen through the windshield of my car is combined with the photorealistic richness of detail in the raindrops. The result is a partially abstract, poetic painting. Rain transforms reality.

In recent years, we’ve come to understand that rain is one of many man-made consequences of global warming. And in a time of climate crisis, global heating, and flooding, it’s hard not to be affected by the alarming threat that rain poses to our planet—both when there’s too much and when there’s too little. Rain, which is essential to all life, can also be destructive.

In art, rain symbolizes cleansing and change in the air. Transformation. My paintings show the world as seen from my—so far—safe perspective.

Like the touch of a drop...

Steen Larsen, 2025