ISSUES

ISSUES is happy to present Adrian Olas’ first solo exhibition at the gallery. The show brings together monochrome paintings of street-stand flowers and black-and-white aerial photographs of miniature houses. Using the mobile phone camera, a perfectly standard yet highly personal tool of recording imagery, Olas gathers impressions of his surroundings that unfold through various layers of forgery: adaptations of photographic, digital-comic, and painterly imagery.

In a coy mise-en-scène of the ostensibly hobbyist reproduction of the artist’s surroundings, notions of authenticity and imitation intertwine. By utilising as well as depicting products that promise individuality through standardised design, model-making and the play of scale weave a subtle dialogue between sincerity and simulation, reflecting the tension between personal expression and mass production.

The cycle of image transformations concludes with the promised inclusion of Caspar David Friedrich: an explicit forgery painted on a Euro-Shop canvas in the artist’s kitchen. These are reproductions of his adopted home country, a plastic Heimat.

The exhibition is accompanied by Teufelstal, a text written by artist and film maker Erik Lavesson.

ADRIAN OLAS *1992, Stockholm, lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Olas received his MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in 2021. In 2022, he pursued a Post Masters in Photographic Artist Book.

Selected exhibitions include Downtown Issues 3, ISSUES, Stockholm (2025); no.info, no.info, Athens (2024); Downtown Issues 2, ISSUES, Stockholm (2023); Half Hearted, Whole Hearted, Heerz Tooya, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria (2023); Luxemburg 1, DN-skrapan, Stockholm (2023); Soup and Sandwiches, ICA-baren, Stockholm (2022); Mass, Study for Art Platform, Stockholm (2021); Downtown Issues, ISSUES, Stockholm (2021); MMXX, graduation exhibition, Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm (2020) and Jord trampad på, Galleri Mejan, Stockholm (2019).

Together with Katarina Sylvan he runs the publishing house Luxemburg Press since 2021.

Book fairs include Art&Theory book shop, Institut Suedois, Paris (2024); Antics Bookfair, Stockholm (2024); Temporary bookshop, Berlin (2023); Paris Ass Book Fair, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2023); Bergen Art Book Fair, Bergen (2023) and Miss Read, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2021).

Published books include Luxemburg 1, Luxemburg Press (2023); [soup], Luxemburg Press; Inwestor, Luxemburg Press; Prospektor, Luxemburg Press and Projektor, Luxemburg Press, all 2022.