Jens Settergren investigates the relationship between nature and technology, and the profound ways these forces shape our understanding of images and collective imagination.

Jens Settergren is a Danish artist, whose work dives into visual culture, unraveling how images seduce, deceive, and structure our desires and fears. Familiar symbols, commercial aesthetics, and everyday objects are displaced into unfamiliar contexts, subverting dominant narratives and revealing the hidden forces that influence how we perceive the world. Using video, photography, sculpture, sound, and digital animation, Settergren creates immersive experiences where the boundary between the organic and synthetic fades into a hypnotic ambiguity.

In his practice, Settergren reflects on how technology shapes our comprehension of the natural world, often challenging the role that contemporary images play in shaping societal beliefs. His multifaceted works blur the distinctions between the real and the imagined, the biological and the mechanical. Rather than offering clear answers, each piece invites viewers to engage with the complexities of modern existence, particularly the unexpected and sometimes unsettling ways in which nature and technology coexist.

Settergren graduated from the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts (2016), he has exhibited extensively across Denmark at prominent venues, including SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark, KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, and Copenhagen Contemporary. Internationally, his work has been presented at Die Raum (Berlin), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Forum des images (Paris), and Art Sonje Center (Seoul). Recent exhibitions include Milk Plus at Viborg Kunsthal (2024), Multitude & Singularity at Maison du Danemark, Paris (2024), and What is this, an exhibition for ants?! at CANTINA in Aarhus (2023). He also participated in Rencontres Internationales at the Louvre (2021) and Grave Monuments at Art Sonje Center (2021), further expanding his global presence.

Settergren‘s work is included in the collections of SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst), the Danish Arts Foundation, KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, and the Copenhagen Municipality among others.

Milk Plus

Bubbles, Orbs, Oracles

GhostBlind

Multitude & Singularity

Kubaparis

Bubbles, Orbs, Oracles

e-Flux

The Great Poor Farm Experiment 2018

Galaksestien, 2021


200 m path, 1,2 m wide. Glass mosaic, granite tiles, concrete.


Permanent public installation, Vollsmose, supported by The Danish Arts Foundation and Odense Municipality

Galaksestien is a sinuous path containing cosmological narratives across time and geographies. It is placed in Vollsmose in the city of Odense in a park connecting a school with a housing area.

Galaksestien is made up of organically shaped granite tiles in three different colors. The path is interrupted by cosmological images in glass mosaic spanning from the ancient Sky Disc of Nebra to NASA's use of supercomputers to visualise black holes. The work investiates connections between the history of mosaic and cosmology from the earliest visualisations of the stars to the sci-fi visions of our future world.