At Home – Viggo Johansen

We were approached by The Hirschsprung Collection, Skagens Museum and Ribe Art Museum to create a film for their exhibition At Home, focusing on Skagen painter Viggo Johansen.

During our research, we became familiar with his beautiful paintings and immediately knew that the film should draw inspiration from Viggo’s use of natural light and his fascination with subjects from the area that differed from those of the better-known Skagen painters.

Our small crew braved the cold and headed for Skagen, which in mid-December still felt a little like the remote fishing village it had been at the beginning of the 20th century.

We returned with red cheeks and beautiful footage of the landscape, which looks somewhat different today with Denmark’s largest fishing harbour in the background. We combined these landscapes with interior scenes that also sought to recreate the atmosphere of the paintings, using natural light and the kind of soft, subdued lamplight found around the turn of the century — the very light Viggo Johansen became known for painting.

With a little help from a set of Lomo anamorphic lenses, the finished film achieved exactly the soft and gentle visual expression we were looking for, complementing the texture of Johansen’s brushstrokes.

The Viggo Johansen exhibition travels from Copenhagen to Ribe before finally arriving in Skagen during 2025.

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