Ditte Ejlerskov and Julie Leopold Alf on Myth, Technology and the Afterlife of the Work

The Edition Solenne conversation between Ditte Ejlerskov and Julie Leopold Alf begins with a very practical question: how does an artist decide when a work is truly finished, and what happens to it once it leaves the studio? From that opening, the discussion unfolds into a wide and layered reflection on artistic control, the shifting boundary between digital and physical work, the emergence of feminist sculptural avatars in Ejlerskov's practice, and the structures that allow contemporary art to circulate at all: galleries, fairs, collectors and trust.

Ejlerskov's position is unusual. She is a painter with a strong figurative and abstract history, whose recent practice increasingly moves between painting, digital sculpture, NFT-based ownership and 3D modelling. Alf, as the founder of Enter Art Fair and a former business lawyer, sees the same art world from the position of infrastructure: how artists are supported, priced, placed, presented and protected. Together they describe a version of contemporary art that is less about producing single objects and more about producing systems that continue to think after the work has left the studio.

Digital sculpture as gypsum copy

A central thread is Ejlerskov's use of 3D-modelled sculpture and NFTs. She is careful to explain that her use of digital sculpture is not a shortcut, nor a novelty gesture. When she began exploring NFTs, she was struck by the analogy to plaster casts. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when great sculptures could not travel from country to country, plaster copies made from moulds allowed the form to circulate. Students could see, study and even walk around a version of a work they might otherwise never encounter. The plaster copy was not the marble original, but it carried the artistic idea into new hands.

Ejlerskov sees the NFT in a similar way. It becomes a certificate of ownership for a form that continues to exist digitally and, in principle, freely. Anyone can look at a digital sculpture. Anyone can download it, share it, use it as a phone screensaver or a background. What the NFT records is who paid for the artistic act, not who is allowed to see the image. This distinction is deliberate. Contemporary art often confuses ownership of an object with ownership of access. The NFT model breaks that confusion.

The question of ownership becomes more complex here. Alf points to the friction: if one person buys the NFT or right, while everyone else can still enjoy the work, what exactly is being owned? The answer may be ego, patronage or a new kind of economic support for public access. The buyer becomes the person who makes the shared life of the work possible. It is a different model from traditional collecting, and one that reveals what the older model often hides.

After the work leaves the studio

Ejlerskov's attitude toward the finished work is unusually unsentimental. Once a work has left the studio, she is not especially distressed by how it is lived with. The work has already done something for her. It has helped her survive, process or move through a thought or feeling. After that, it can belong to someone else's room, gaze or interpretation. This does not mean the exhibition context is irrelevant. It matters that the work is shown properly and, materially, that it can support her life as an artist. But the meaning is no longer hers alone to control.

This openness extends to viewers. Ejlerskov admits that she often enters exhibitions without reading the press release, accepting that she may experience the work differently from the artist's stated intention. Alf sees this as essential to making art less intimidating. Many people approach art with the fear that they do not understand it correctly. But the encounter is not an exam. A viewer brings a particular life, grief, desire or memory to the work. What the work does in that moment can be real even when it diverges from the artist's origin story.

Sometimes the accidental becomes inseparable from the work. Alf recalls a child seeing sadness in a painted tear, only for the artist to explain that the tear began as a dropped mark of paint. The explanation does not weaken the image. The tear remained because it needed to remain. Ejlerskov recognises this logic in her own studio. A child's accidental reading of a small ninja inside one of her jungle paintings forced her to keep working until the figure either disappeared or transformed. Interpretation enters the work, whether invited or not.

Ejlerskov's practice is full of such transformations. Older paintings may be altered, overpainted, cut up or woven into new works. A piece can be finished once and then become finished again in another state. Digital photography also plays a role in this process. Looking at a work reduced on a phone can reveal structures that the full-size painting hides. Sometimes the better version existed earlier in the process, visible only in a studio image taken before the work moved on.

Some works resist digital translation altogether. Gradients are difficult to photograph. Woven, dense or vibrating surfaces can produce interference patterns on camera. This resistance matters because Ejlerskov's practice sits precisely between the digital and the physical. The digital can circulate, certify, model and open the work. The physical can exceed the image, withholding its full effect until one stands before it.

Five feminist avatars

The conceptual centre of the conversation is Ejlerskov's use of science fiction, feminism and myth. She has described her work as shaping a feminist and post-futuristic space where myth and technology can coexist. That description remains accurate, but its force lies in the particular figures she has developed over the last five to ten years.

The first defining figure was a pair of female wrestlers, translated from the male wrestlers that have moved through art history by drawing, copying and casting. Viewers often read them as feminist sculptures because two women are shown in combat. Ejlerskov accepts that reading, though it was not the initial intention. The work led her to a broader question: what would a feminist avatar look like in sculpture?

Her answer is deliberately multiple. There is no single feminist form because there is no single feminist strategy. Some days feminism is combat. Some days it is surrender. Some days it is devotion, bodily knowledge, victory or release. Ejlerskov's five sculptural series become avatars that can be chosen, returned to and inhabited differently.

The wrestlers are one form. A separated version, Hunters, emerged almost accidentally in a 3D program when the figures split apart; together, they became a team on the hunt. Another figure translates the Greek Diadoumenos, the athlete tying the victory fillet, into a female form concerned with landing in victory. Ran, drawn from the Norse goddess of the sea, bends backward in a posture that evokes strength, hysteria, sexuality, intuition and the cultural fear of female force. A final bowed figure suggests gratitude, release, burden, crown and inheritance. None of these figures resolves the others. They form a circular system rather than a sequence.

The references are mythological, historical and bodily, but Ejlerskov does not describe herself as a conventional researcher. She speaks openly about ADHD and difficulty reading. Knowledge enters through listening, museums, conversations, titles, fragments, making and testing. She calls herself more of a cut-and-paste person than an intellectual one. The description is useful because it refuses the false split between knowledge and making. Her work thinks by handling.

The infrastructure of circulation

Alf's perspective brings the conversation back to the structures that allow such work to circulate: galleries, fairs, collectors and timing. She resists the idea that galleries simply order work on demand. A solo exhibition may require years of work, and a fair presentation has to respect what the artist is actually making. The gallerist's role is not only sales; it is career support, administration, positioning, pricing, collector relationships, institutional contact and protection of time.

Ejlerskov complicates this with her experience in Sweden and Denmark. Having lived in Sweden for twelve years and built a major part of her network there, she sees a more cautious Swedish attitude toward exposure. Too much visibility, too quickly, can be perceived as dangerous. Denmark, by contrast, can feel more willing to let momentum build. The difference may be tied to auction culture, resale and the risk of newly acquired works being flipped too quickly.

This brings the discussion back to one of the most difficult questions in contemporary art: where should a work go? Alf understands the importance of placement. A work entering an institution, a strong collection or a committed private home can support an artist's long-term career. Ejlerskov notes that a gallery like Martin Asbæk knows many of its buyers and can judge who should be allowed to acquire a work. The aim is not only to sell, but to place the work where it will live rather than disappear into storage or speculation.

Trust is therefore central. Gallery relationships often begin less formally than outsiders expect: a few works tried at a fair, a back-office presentation, a group show, then a deeper collaboration. Alf, trained as a business lawyer before entering the art field, finds the looseness striking. Yet she also sees why contracts cannot solve the essential problem. A creative relationship depends on whether the artist feels seen, supported and understood. A legal document cannot force real work into being.

Colour, commission and control

Ejlerskov's own history with commission and control sharpens the point. Her earlier paintings of Britney Spears, Nicki Minaj and especially Rihanna became a way to move from figuration toward abstraction. By following the daily paparazzi image of Rihanna's clothing, she created abstract paintings that looked like 1960s formalism but were actually based on pop-cultural surfaces: checks, stripes, textures, outfits. The rule freed her.

The official portrait of Helle Thorning-Schmidt did the opposite. As Denmark's first female prime minister, Thorning-Schmidt was an important subject, but the pressure of likeness and public opinion changed the painting process entirely. Ejlerskov became so focused on resemblance that the work no longer felt like her previous paintings. Afterward, she did not paint figuratively for ten years.

This is why the seemingly simple collector request, can it be a little more blue, is not simple at all. Ejlerskov's gradient paintings are made through many layers with very little pigment, each colour shifting through accumulation. To decide in advance that a work should end as blue or green is harder than it sounds. The colour has to be reached honestly. If the heart is not in it, the work should not leave the studio.

Colour, for Ejlerskov, is not merely visual. Her gradient paintings have been shaped by interests in Ayurveda, historical colour healing and the idea that different colours carry different frequencies or needs. She describes periods where she could only reach for red pigments, then other periods where only blue made sense. When she was finished with a colour, she could barely stand to look at it in the studio. The attraction and rejection of colour became a bodily rhythm.

That rhythm gives the conversation its deepest continuity. Whether Ejlerskov is working with NFTs, plaster analogies, feminist avatars, pop icons, public portraits, gradients or gallery placement, the work is always in motion. It changes state, medium, owner, viewer, meaning and temperature. Alf's contribution is to show how the art system receives and distributes that motion: through fairs, galleries, collectors, institutions and trust.

The result is a portrait of an artist for whom technology does not replace material, and myth does not oppose the future. A digital sculpture can behave like a plaster cast. A feminist avatar can emerge from a sneeze in a 3D program. A Rihanna outfit can become an abstract painting. A colour can become a form of healing and then become unbearable. A work can leave the studio and become someone else's image without ceasing to be the artist's truth.