About Lise Eiler

About Lise Eiler

Lise Eiler lives and works at Nørrebro, Copenhagen. Since March 2017 her workshop address has been 15 Esromgade - a house with many creative companies. She is a M.A. in Art History and Russian and has attended extensive courses in painting, graphic arts, drawing and modelling at Langeland High School of Art (1995) and Aarhus School of Art (1998). From Jun 2006 to Jan 2012 she had a combined workshop and showroom in Rantzausgade, and after that became part of the atelier community Kong Georg at Frederiksberg. In later years her main focus has been on portraits - but for many years she has also been keen on depicting the changing of buildings in the city and fleeting motives like reconstruction and demolition processes. Lises paintings have featured in numerous exhibitions and she has delivered various specific tasks to order. Moreover, she has successfully created several permanent decorations and in different connections practised the teaching of art.

Lise Eiler paints vivid, and lifelike portraits, both single and group portraits - with an eye for the correlation between several persons. A commissioned portrait is initiated in a meeting, at which she gets acquainted with the person to be portrayed, and shoots a series of photos. A photo that captures the uniqueness of the individual becomes the starting point of the painting. In the final portrait she aims to capture both the characteristic features and personality of the individual portrayed. The portrait is a "snapshot" of a changeable face, and she lets the painting process be part of the final expression - by leaving visible brush strokes and running paint.

Besides the portrait commissions, in which Lise Eiler works on faces of all ages,  also famous faces, she has been asked for large portrait exhibitions and decorations. For NorthSide Festival 2018 she created a portrait wall with nine large portraits of singers who performed that year. For literature devotee Lise Lotte Frederiksen she created a wall with her favourite authors in different sizes, and June - September 2021 her exhibition FORFATTERPORTRÆTTER (Portraits of Authors) can be seen at Dokk1 in Aarhus. Lise Eiler has painted the portraits of seven authors with a connection to Aarhus. The paintings are supplemented with interviews/sound images and an Aarhus quotation from each author.

Lise Eiler has also worked with portraits on paper - different expressions, small scale. Her unique one-line-portraits are formed by one long piece of string. When the face has been formed, the two loose ends of string are allowed to hang and can be arranged in different ways in the framing.

You will also find examples of portraits by Lise Eiler, painted with her fingers, simply using white paint on blue paper with a texture. 

Lise Eiler's city paintings show buildings undergoing changes. The buildings catches her eye, because they suddenly appear different. With her camera she preserves the momentary appearance of buildings which are being constructed, demolished, are wrapped in scaffolding or in a state of dilapidation. The photographs constitute the basis of her - often large - acrylic paintings. She finds aesthetics in the disorder of building sites, and by capturing the transformation, she gives value to the process. "The process contains many possibilities, and the secret is to see it not only as something to get over with," says Lise Eiler. She does not meticulously finish her paintings in every detail, which adds to them a dynamic element, emphasises the content of an ongoing process.

Lise Eiler’s focus on construction has given her customers in the construction industry. Companies have ordered artworks for their domiciles showing construction projects, they are proud of. The fact that the decoration tells a story about the company it is made for, makes it relevant for customers and employees, and Lise Eiler can paint the creation or demolition of a building in a way that makes it interesting also for people outside the business.

Lise Eiler has created a number of permanent decorations e.g. for schools, institutes of education and domiciles. They all have the common trait that they tell tales about the places they were created for. When Lise designs a decoration for a particular place, it is essential for her that it takes part in defining the nature of that place - and that it fits into the architecture. Decorations for schools and educational institutes have been created with participation of pupils / students.