Mads Hilbert

Mads Hilbert (b. 1993, Helsinge, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen. He holds an MFA from Funen Art Academy.

Rooted in a sensorial engagement with cultivated nature, Hilbert’s painting practice opens spaces for pause and quiet intensity. Through washy brushstrokes, his paintings form ornamental, loosely structured compositions in which figuration and abstraction remain in active dialogue. Drawn to the incomplete, he works within the charged threshold between sketch and finished work, allowing intuition and spontaneity to guide the image of the landscape. These landscapes often appear fragmented and dreamlike, occasionally inhabited by solitary male figures who are searching and unsettled. Hilbert’s paintings operate as portals into cycles of growth and decay, where pigment and light act like photosynthesis on canvas. Compositions bloom, dissolve, and reassemble, vibrating continuously as focus is lost and rediscovered.

In Hilbert’s most recent works, his sensorial openness has evolved into an exploration of queerness, intimacy, and male companionship, where bodies, desire, and friendship inhabit the landscape itself. Drawing on art historical references and rural motifs, his paintings evoke cultivated ground as sites of longing, care, and fertility, while their titles and imagery invite an examination of words and forms with multiple meanings. The works carry several interpretive layers and embrace subtle contrasts, crystallizing both the graceful and the harrowing, the trivial and the extraordinary, the ephemeral and the vital, the hidden and the evident, in a uniquely curious and sensitive manner.

Mads Hilbert
Born 1993, Denmark.
Lives and works in Copenhagen.

EDUCATION
MA from Funen Art Academy

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2026
Jordkammerater, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

2024
Verdure, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

2023
Parque México, Outpost Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

2022
Fingerbøl, Outpost Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024
Art Herning, Herning, Denmark,

2023
Onions, Outpost Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

Aoûtiens, À mon avis, Copenhagen, Denmark

1525, pt.2 gallery, Oakland, United States

2022
ET MYSTISK & MORFISK UNIVERS, Albert Contemporary, Odense, Denmark

2021
Date, K19, Copenhagen, Denmark

2019
BESTSELLER, Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, Denmark