Human figures suspended in mid-air, bodies falling or flying across the walls of residential buildings, their elongated shadows multiplying the sense of movement. The work of street artist Anders Gjennestad is instantly recognisable — though reducing him to street art alone would be selling him short.

Born in Norway in 1980 and based in Berlin, Gjennestad has been represented by Galerie Friedmann-Hahn since 2010 and works across multiple disciplines: murals, canvas painting, reliefs. The thread running through all of it is the same — to deconstruct and contextualise — but the surfaces change, and with them the way the work speaks to its audience. In his paintings, such as the recent The Convention Confirmation, the same visual language of his murals — bodies in motion, meticulous multi-layer stencils, tension between figure and ground — is transferred onto surfaces that carry an entirely different kind of history.

The starting point is always photography: Gjennestad shoots his own images of people and fabrics in motion, capturing the flow of life, and builds his compositions from there. On urban walls, the surface itself — cracks, stains, layers of torn posters — is never just a backdrop but an integral part of the work, an element that amplifies the sense of movement and suspended time. Worn matter and bodies in flight enter into dialogue, and the result is a visual paradox: intensely dynamic figures frozen in a single instant, on surfaces that carry the marks of decades.