Liv Dahl

Liv Dahl (b. 1999, Oslo) makes oil paintings in which the human face is held at the threshold of legibility — surfacing from a dark ground, or slipping back into it. Working on raw, frequently unstretched linen, she lets the weave absorb thinned oil so that an eye, a mouth, the turn of a jaw arrives with photographic specificity before the rest of the figure withdraws into shadow. Her palette is narrow and deliberate: black, bone, oxblood, a bruised grey-blue. Drips are left where they fall; the tacking edge is rarely hidden. The pictures court a kind of forensic intimacy and then refuse it, withholding the very recognition they seem to promise. Raised between Oslo and the American Midwest, Dahl studied philosophy before turning to painting, and her titles — often parenthetical, dry, faintly literary — carry that earlier training. She works from found photographs, family images and her own loose snapshots, though the source is never the subject; what interests her is the moment a likeness stops being a person and becomes paint. The youngest artist on the gallery's roster, she completed her MFA in 2024 and joined Brunner & Sand in 2025. She lives and works in New York.

I paint people the way I remember them, which is to say wrongly, in pieces, mostly the eyes. A face is only ever half there before the dark takes the rest, and I have stopped trying to talk it out of that. The linen does as much as I do; I just decide when to leave it alone.