Artist statement

My name is Anton Falck, and I am a visual artist, performer and musician based in Copenhagen and Berlin.
Artistically, most people probably know me as the lead singer of First Hate, which I started in 2013 and which has been a big part of my life for many years.
I move best to music and intuitive movement and dance are a strong part of me as a performer and artist.
Music has been my entrance to art, but today my work with drawing, painting and sculpture fills at least as much.
After 10 years as a musician, I dropped out of RMC’s composition line and applied to the Danish Academy of Fine Arts with crossed fingers.
I had a huge need to create something physical that my hands could shape and touch after so many years of music that is invisible and repetitive.

I make art because I need to create things with my hands and everything stems from the feeling of playing.
It’s a way of digging into myself and society and putting something other than words to what is impossible to put into words.
It’s often about desire, relationships, power and inner conflicts around freedom and vulnerability. But if I could put into words exactly what it is, there would be no reason for me to create it.
I work quite intuitively, also when I draw. My drawings often consist of long, continuous doodle lines that turn into small scenes with people, objects and animals, especially horses. For me, the horse is a strange dualistic figure that symbolizes both strength and vulnerability, freedom and submission at the same time. It can be wild, but also tamed and I ask myself why people have such a great need to tame everything around them including each other, and as a queer person I wonder what wildness I have let tame in order to fit in. Can a horse go wild again or is it tame once it is tamed? I think my initial fascination with the horse is connected to some more instinctive or childish notions of freedom, and the dream of having a horse, and of its natural beauty.

My images lie somewhere between the everyday and the slightly more theatrical. Sometimes they feel very concrete, other times more like little myths or dreams. I am not so interested in giving a clear answer to what it all means, but more in creating things and letting them live in our shared reality.
My background in music and performance still plays a big role in what I do. I think a lot about mood, rhythm and how a work meets an audience.
In my current music project I work more personally and directly, with themes around sexuality and living on the edge of norms.
It is closely related to what I do visually.

Right now I work a lot with figurative works as a starting point. I make a lot of sketches that I later translate into larger paintings and sculptures.
It feels like a way to build on something that is already in progress, but also as a new direction, where I bring the intuitive into something more processed.

Overall, I try to find a language for all the absurdities that life is actually made up of.
The medium changes often but the goal is always the same.