Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen explores painterly space, drawing inspiration from the built environment via photography and models. His paintings often explore the utopian aspirations attached to the meaning of the private space, contextualised within the history of Modernism and current architectural discourse.

His work is permeated by an acute interest in to how architectural structures function as extensions of human consciousness, while testifying to the contemporary understanding of the human condition. Havsteen-Mikkelsen presents built environments as sites of conflict, the architectural structures being the visual representation of both a conscious and unconscious perception of the body.

The works in his show Look At This World can be seen as a tribute to film director Jacques Tati and the subtle critique of contemporary life in his film Playtime from 1967. All the paintings have been inspired from stills from the film, but transformed and interpreted in a new direction with a stronger focus on the abstract nature of architecture and its impact on the human mind.

“What first amazed me about Jacques T. was his ability to convey space as a subject with its own will. And in this game of spaces, the human being was almost a puppet, seemingly free, subdued to a spatial logic that it itself had created and yet now had become the slave of. Are we ready for Playtime?” Look AT This World – A ventilated prose-performance by Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen, Berlin, 2013