Stephen Vollo — A House
28 November 2025 – 9 January 2026
"I have always felt that there was such a beauty in such a room, even if there were no people in it—perhaps precisely because there were none."
- Quote by Vilhelm Hammershøi Danish painter (1864-1916) known as "The Master of Silence"
Stephen Vollo (b. 1988, Rochester, NY) works in a quiet, sensuous figurative style that carry a quiet intensity reminiscent of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s interiors. Like Hammershøi, Vollo transforms the quiet and everyday into a place of presence, where light, surface, and rhythm in the painting evoke both calm and unease. A room, a bed, a window, or a glance becomes a symbol of life’s opposites – dreams and restlessness, love and solitude, hope and loss.
His paintings focus on the familiar and the domestic – a bed, a room, a human figure – motifs that at first appear simple but gradually unfold into more complex, existential spaces we all recognize.
Vollo paints with a technical discipline reflecting his training at the New York Academy of Art. His works are both poetic and psychological, yet they do not depict a narrative or action; rather, they create situations or stillness that the viewer can feel and recognize.
A House brings together new paintings inspired by personal observations from Vollo’s upbringing in the suburbs outside Rochester, NY. The mood of a room someone has just left, the glance between people watching TV in the evening, or the cool blue light of the news flickering through a window – the concrete and familiar are transformed into something universal. The motifs are not documentary, but atmospheres: small mental spaces where presence and distance, past and present, intimacy and anonymity coexist.
Although the exhibition mainly explores spaces and atmospheres, A House also includes four portraits. Vollo does not see them as traditional portraits, but as figures carrying their own atmosphere. The people are known to him, yet the paintings focus more on universal traits and moods than on specific identities.
Vollo works slowly and in layers with his oil paintings on canvas stretched over panels. The thick, almost relief-like layers of paint create a vivid texture, making surfaces feel alive – for example, the asphalt in one painting appears so textural it seems real. His works have a tactile quality that balances the tangible with the ephemeral.
The paintings often begin with a single room but expand to include people, life, and surrounding details – mirrors, windows, TV screens, wine glasses – all elements both personal and familiar in American culture. The theme of the house becomes central, not as a specific building but as a physical and psychological center where both comfort and unease can be felt.
In A House, the house is not understood as a particular address, but as a state of being: a place where the world steps back, and reflection comes forward. An inner landscape shaped by memory, light, season, the passage of time, and small moments that settle in us without our knowing why. Vollo’s paintings are quiet but never empty; they open a space where the viewer can enter – and remain.
Stephen Vollo will be present at the opening.
Opening reception Friday, November 28th: 17:00 – 19:00
Gallery Poulsen, Staldgade 32, Copenhagen
For more info, contact:
aW5mbyB8IGdhbGxlcnlwb3Vsc2VuICEgY29t | +45 33 33 93 96
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