Grieving soldiers – Artwork from the Conjoined series

A picture of the artwork called Grieving soldiers by Bjørn Eirik Østbakken. It is in lots of different colors and the motif is two soldiers with helmets and weapons.
Grieving soldiers ©Eirik Østbakken

This arwork is called Grieving soldiers and is in the Conjoined series.

The series Conjoined consists of oil paintings and photographs. The series confronts contemporary issues and visualize human emotional experiences such as powerlessness, anxiety and frustration. These feelings can occur when we are in a situation or a place we feel we cannot escape. The images can be associated with today’s challenges of war, pandemic, disease and poverty. They can also be linked to general social challenges such as integration, unemployment, violence, drug addiction or loneliness.

The subjects in the paintings are two or three people intertwined in different ways – like conjoined twins. They are trying to get away from each other. They try to go in separate directions, fight and shoot themselves or the other twin. The desperation is not immediately prominent since the pictures are painted with cheerful colors, and in that sense the color palette hides the dark actions in the subject.

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