Born 1969, Lødingen, Norway. Lives and works in Oslo.

Trude Viken grew up in a nautical town and turned early to art, but as a teenager she was steered toward a stable path in healthcare. She worked as a nurse’s aide, a profession that still permeates her imagery through crosses, uniforms, sutures, and a sustained focus on the interior lives and roles of women. She describes her adult years as swift and blurry, marked by marriage and family, yet she continued to paint privately. In her late forties she applied to the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and was denied; around 2010 she committed fully to painting and began sharing work online, leading to discovery and a breakthrough in 2018.

Her practice centers on raw, expressionistic portraiture and figural scenes. Thick, tactile oil and saturated color knead faces and bodies until social masks slip, revealing ambivalence, care, desire, shame, and resilience. The ongoing “Diary Notes” series anchors this language as compressed, intimate studies, while larger compositions stage charged encounters drawn from everyday life and the economies of care.

Viken engages expressionist lineages including Edvard Munch, the School of London, and Paula Rego. These influences register as attitude rather than citation: paint as flesh, feeling made material, a directness that resists polish. Healthcare motifs recur as indices of touch and repair, entwining questions of vulnerability, embodiment, and the ethics of looking.

Her surfaces shift between thin veils and heavy impasto; features press, double, and skew; chroma flares abruptly. The “Diary Notes” operate as a modular archive, at times installed in monumental grids, while recent canvases widen the frame to scenes of birth, convalescence, and unruly desire. Throughout, matter carries psyche: ridge and smear, bruise and blush.

Viken studied at DTK, Det Tverrfaglige Kunstinstitutt, 2009–2012. Selected solo exhibitions include Fortnight Institute, New York, Faces and Traces, 2018; Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Night Eyes, 2021; Belenius, Stockholm, Midnight Activities, 2022; OTP Copenhagen, Double Portraits, 2022; Fortnight Institute, New York, Night Crawlers, 2023; Belenius, Stockholm, Inside Out, 2024; OTP Copenhagen, Veiled in Pink, 2024; Ricco/Maresca, New York, 2025.

Across formats, Viken transforms portraiture into a contemporary vocabulary of exposure and care. The works are not illustrations of feeling but sites where feeling becomes visible through matter, insistent, bodily, and alive.