Two Things Can Be True #5

In her new body of work, Two Things Can Be True, Astri Styrkestad Haukaas approaches painting as an embodied experience rather than a depiction of place. Her landscapes emerge from memory, sensation, and emotional residue, holding grief and beauty in equal measure. Influenced by artists such as Edvard Munch, Arthur Dove, and Miriam Cahn, Haukaas explores landscape not as scenery but as a condition — something felt physically and carried within the body long after a place or moment has passed. The work is grounded in the belief that loss and joy coexist, and that nature offers solace not through sentimentality, but through its quiet persistence. Working intuitively and physically, Haukaas creates paintings that function as emotional terrains rather than literal environments. Layers of color and gesture hold traces of time, memory, and transformation, inviting viewers into spaces that feel both deeply personal and universally familiar. These paintings do not attempt to resolve grief or move beyond it; instead, they inhabit the complex terrain where absence, beauty, and continuity exist simultaneously — where, as the title suggests, two things can be true at once. In the artists words: What remains of someone is not an image. It is a sensation — weight, warmth, the particular blue of things seen from far away. These paintings begin in the body. Not grief as subject, but grief as ground — the layer beneath every color, every gesture, every mark that has been put down and partially let go. Grief held hands with joy. It always has. The surfaces hold time the way stones hold warmth: invisibly, until you press them to your skin. What appears is not a landscape you can visit. It is a landscape that visits you. Two things can be true. The loss is real. So is the beauty of standing somewhere that matters, without being able to say why.