Like a Swan with Heartache features new paintings by Danish artist Anders Scrmn Meisner. His images transform everyday encounters and family memories into richly imagined scenes. Moving between theatrical landscapes, flowers, animals, and familiar objects, Anders explores the tenderness beneath appearances and the ways ordinary things become vessels for love, longing, and care.

The exhibition marks Meisner's second solo presentation with Isabel Sullivan Gallery and his first at the gallery’s new Chelsea location. The paintings are rendered in his distinctive visual language, the vividly colored, meticulously composed paintings that draw on aesthetic elements of Pop Art, folk art, and Fauvism.

The exhibition’s title captures a tension central to these works: an outward impression of beauty and assurance that conceals a vulnerable interior. 

Anders explains: 

“I bought some Italian grapes called ‘Autumn Crisp’. They are very hyped because they are crispy on the outside and super soft on the inside. I like to think about this while I'm painting – I want the paintings to look crispy, but be vulnerable and soft inside.

I like to think that the title is a sort of dramatization of this. Swans have partners for life and can suffer from heartache. They symbolize beauty and pride but can carry great pain. I like to think about people and paintings with this in mind.”

The blue painting that lends the exhibition its title began after an evening at the opera with his wife, Carolina. Having recently watched David Hockney discuss his opera set designs, Meisner spent the performance imagining a production of his own. In the studio the following day, that imagined setting became a floating stage, with small boats passing before singers and dancers, trees and comets animating the scene, and a patterned upper border suggesting a theatrical proscenium.

Elsewhere, intimate experiences take on an enlarged, emblematic presence. In The Leaf That Got Stuck in Your Hair – I Keep It, a monumental leaf grows out of the discovery of a box in which Carolina keeps love letters, concert tickets and other mementos of their life together. The discovery recalled a photograph of her climbing a tree early in their relationship, bringing together the fleeting moment and the impulse to preserve it.

The Teardrops I Collected from Your Chin began with the simple act of wiping a tear from his daughter’s face. Returning to a motif that has appeared in his paintings for more than a decade, Meisner considers both the accumulated gestures of parenthood and the broader human capacity for empathy. 

The exhibition’s largest painting, Last Days of Summer, adopts the expansive proportions of cinema to convey the fullness and melancholy of a season nearing its end. Mourning the end of the Scandinavian summer is a recurring theme in the artist’s work. In A Room to Nap In, tulips rise above a frieze of a woman sleeping in the woods, inspired by Roman murals and the pleasure of imagining an environment devoted to rest.

Across these new works, Meisner gives passing observations a lasting life in pictures. Affection, humor and an awareness of time’s passage coexist in paintings that invite viewers to consider what lies beneath a bright surface—and how much feeling a small gesture can hold.