Since the Philip Morris Art Prize was awarded to her in 1999, Elka Oudenampsen has been painting steadily, balancing between figuration and abstraction. Her former ‘characters’ disappeared in a forest of geometric ‘landscapes’, in which elementary forms such as the cylinder, the oval and the rectangle are strongly present. It is sometimes simply two- dimensional and at the same time spatially dynamic, while all colours make your eyes tremble. No, colours are only a means to achieve something, but not the goal in itself. Composition is also her playing field, no more and no less. She arranges and defines the world she sees. This development by painter Oudenampsen can be seen as a journey with no end. Colours, shapes, overlap in compositions and patterns, as a reflection from her inner landscape. Elka Oudenampsen brings something to life. Examining what colour does, what the eye observes. Contrasts deliver new experiences and put everything in a different perspective. Her energy arises in the making, searching for a spatial collage, to a controlled final image. In her earlier work you can still see fragments from reality. More recent canvases are painted in a range of colours and delimited in forms.