Mads Bryld

Forest of Marks

Eighteen is pleased to present 

Forest of Marks
A solo exhibition by Mads Bryld
October 2 – November 14, 2026

Dense woods encircle the bog. A primordial landscape, dinosaur soup, shaped by the slow, relentless cycles of nature. Eerily beautiful and alluring, it draws you in. It will swallow you.

Layers of organic material have settled heavily upon one another, constantly decomposing and regenerating. A landscape that breathes and smells, seemingly untouched, where time is measured on nature’s clock, while the terrain continues to work. A mundane transcendental dream scape.

Murky waters with shimmering surfaces. Mud, sand, plants, fungi, wood, animals, worms and insects, interconnected. Sunlight pierces the foliage, bouncing off the water and casting dancing waves onto the trees. An ephemeral palette, changing from dawn till dusk and with the seasons. The topography of bark: silky smooth, scared, cracked plateaus and deep canyons, changing with exposure and age. Roots forming intricate entangled communal weaves. Everything in constant motion, swirling slow-motion.

The bog lady brews at dawn. Parents tell their children, don’t go near, but we always do.

Forrest of Marks is an exhibition about the texture of memories, the traces landscapes leave on us, and the traces we carry with us. The bog, the exhibition’s protagonist, is a place where memory, matter and time overlap.

A black hole in the forest floor that mirrors the universe.

The point of departure for a Forest of Marks is Mads Bryld’s local bog — Utterslev Mose — a large, 200-hectare semi-natural wetland and public park area located six kilometres northwest of central Copenhagen. Originally an undeveloped swampy bog and part of Copenhagen’s historic fortification ring, it was re-engineered between 1939 and 1943 into its current park status. Bryld runs and walks in the area almost every day all year round. The exhibition comprises 10 oil paintings on canvas in various sizes created over the past year. 

Text by Jesper Elg

Mads Bryld (b. 1991) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is an architect by education and worked as a landscape architect for a leading studio in Copenhagen (2020–2025). Bryld’s work has been presented in recent solo exhibitions at Haricot Gallery, London (2026); JOHS, New York (2026); and V1 SALON (2025, 2024). 

Forest of Marks is Mads Bryld's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Forest of Marks
Exhibition essay by Morten Brock Danielsen

Signs of spring on every hand; the trees, dripping wet, were swelling in the bark and stretched twigs and buds up into the clean-washed air; there was a sparkling high and low, the sun clear but not yet hot, like a sisterly light in the sky, the daylight penetrating to the bottom of the shadowless woods, the stems a gem-like green, a twittering and calling of birds as in great empty chambers where they were to move in, but soon there would be settling and building. Away over the open plains hung the lark in a dazzling noonday glory of sunlight. 

And Norna Gaest followed the lark into the open country, continued northward over the heights, with broad horizons lying beneath him, a sheet of water far away, fjord or lake, clouds and sky in a mighty expanse above his head.

— Johannes V. Jensen, The Long Journey (1908)

Norna Gaest, a legendary figure from Norse sage tradition, is no ordinary wanderer. In the saga, he lives for hundreds of years and so passes through the very epochs and landscapes he traverses: ice, forest, plain, spring after spring after spring. In the writing of Johannes V. Jensen, he becomes a metaphor for the passage of time itself; the human being as a figure moving through deep layers of time, not merely through landscapes. This same movement gives the exhibition Forest of Marks its title: the sensation of swimming through time in the flickering shadows of trees, through a landscape which, like a dinosaur, continues to dissolve and add new strata for new ages. A muddy depth beneath the surface of the water. The sticky soil and wet sand as a clay layer of time, where organisms die and yet endure.

This is no accidental metaphor, for this is precisely what a bog does. What settles there does not rot away; it lingers, year after year, in dense oxygen-poor strata that preserve rather than dissolve. For several years, Mads Bryld has walked through such a bog: returning to the same places, the same trees, the same pools of water, the same views. The bog has become a personal landscape of remembrance in a state of constant transformation. Here, nature is not a splendid backdrop, but something to return to, again and again, until the place itself begins to resemble a form of memory: the same trees that return, seen on different days, in different light, across the span of a life. 

The same timeless, fickle sensation, is encountered in Mads Bryld’s paintings. Here, nature is neither naively idealised nor romanticised, but appears as a concurrent, dynamic cycle of life, death and renewal, a mirror of the human condition itself. In painterly terms, Bryld’s works with the same shimmering quality he finds in the bog. His oil paintings exist in continual transition, slipping between the figurative and the abstract. Light glides over fleeting, liquid surfaces, causing the images to emerge, dissolve and return, as though the landscape were ever indecisive. We know these places without being able to locate them geographically; we recognise them intuitively rather than consciously. Shifts in scale and cropping create an unsettling intimacy, where past, present and future seem to exist simultaneously in the same layer of paint, like sediment at the bottom of the bog, as seen, among other works, in the painting In the Fade (2026).

Another Danish painter also turned obsessively towards a natural phenomenon, though through light rather than place: Valdemar Schønheyder Møller (1864-1905), “The Sun’s painter” as he has been called. Throughout his life, he sought to paint what the Japanese painting tradition calls komorebi: the light that breaks between leaves and trunks and, for an instant, transforms the forest into something other than itself. Where Bryld allows his landscapes to emerge and dissolve in slow, fluid layers, Schønheyder painted the sun as a dazzling, almost corporeal clash: “a picture in two values” as he wrote, the sun and everything else. 

Two ways of paint time, separated by more than a hundred years: one vertical and explosive, the other horizontal and layered, yet both sustained by the same insistence that one place, one light, can contain an entire world, if only one keeps looking. Norna Gaest sought the open and wandered farther north, towards new visual fields. Bryl has found his by staying in the bog, year after year, until the light down there became deep enough to swim through.

Exhibition essay by Morten Brock Danielsen, written in conjunction with Forest of Marks, a solo exhibition by Mads Bryld at Eighteen, October 2 – November 14, 2026.