Ragna Braase
& Nanna Abell, Martin Erik Andersen, Andreas Eriksson, FOS, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Bjørn Nørgaard, Kirstine Roepstorff, Tove Storch and Mette Winckelmann
09 May – 14 Jun 2025
Ragna Braase &
Nanna Abell, Martin Erik Andersen, Andreas Eriksson, FOS, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Bjørn Nørgaard, Kirstine Roepstorff, Tove Storch and Mette Winckelmann
A series of gouaches by Ragna Braase, created between 1973 and 1975, provides the basis for the group exhibition where Braase’s works serve as a lens for the other artists, bringing the materiality and colour of the individual works into focus.
The colour-saturated gouache works by Braase are abstract and distinct in expression. A number of works are distinguished by deep purple and pink colours. The idiom is not overtly expressive, and the pieces are not dominated by the artist’s gestures. What is expressed is rather the colour and the paint per se. Gouache is a water-based paint that allows the artist to let the paint flow causing the colours to blend, but it is more opaque than watercolour and produces deep, saturated colours. Gouache paint possesses more physical body than watercolour, and in several of Braase’s works the colour settles in soft lumps. The colours also merge and bleed into one another, oscillating between solidified colour intensity and blurring.
Motifs are abstract, but a few of the works feature round or elliptical shapes. The oval shapes are not necessarily given any direct shading but, overall, they are recognisable as eggs of a kind, despite, technically, not being rendered with the same depth as an egg. Eggs are both an everyday subject and, in some ways, banal, but they also appear as a motif in art history. When its form is intact, an egg can symbolise purity and innocence and when it is broken, the loss of these qualities. It is also a symbol of fertility with more implicit than explicit sexual connotations. In Braase’s work the egg shapes do not come across as having direct symbolic meaning; they are rather like very personal signs or expressions. While they don’t seem symbolic, they may well have an esoteric feel to them. The works can be seen as the outcome of mystical exercises intended to give the person holding the brush access to a higher and truer dimension.
Both the symbolic and the esoteric seek meaning in a way that cuts across the individual or the concrete. The specific egg, as a symbol, becomes a general egg and the sign of an esoteric exercise meant to lift the practitioner to another level, where insight and liberation from the concrete and the specific are achieved. On the esoteric level this means leaving the material quagmire in favour of a world of invisible vibrations.
In the 2013 film The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza) the protagonist, the cultural journalist Jep Gambardella, interviews the performance artist Talia Concept who tells him that she lives on extra-sensory vibrations. Gambardella is not impressed and wants to know more about these vibrations which Concept cannot describe very well. Gambardella himself lives through his senses, seeking the good life and the beauty of sensual pleasure. Despite his more down-to-earth approach to life beauty remains elusive, seemingly becoming progressively harder for him to experience. As a result, he torments his surroundings with his cynicism.
Braase’s gouaches are not invisible esoteric vibrations, although they may at times present an air of mysticism. The kind of mysticism they possess is more concrete and material. Their deep colours can be described as vibrant, but it’s their saturated materiality that lends them a quivering quality.
The other works in the exhibition all share Braase’s intensity of material which can be explored through glass, ceramics, silver, textiles, concrete, salt as well as rope. Like Braase’s works they may possess an element of impenetrability that can feel alluringly mystical, but they are not symbolic. The works are specific and derive their character from their materials, which they can almost be said to perform.
All the artists in the exhibition have worked in different media over time. For some of them the continual exploration of new materials is an ingrained part of their practice, while others work with a particular material for longer periods of time. None are ‘pure’ potters, weavers or painters, they are all immersed in materially impure practices that lend weight to their works.
Without symbolic meaning and due to their weight, the works in the exhibition are immediately accessible to the viewer. Yet their beauty may well be experienced as ephemeral. The material nature of the works is only accessible when the viewer simultaneously experiences their own materiality, which requires the abandonment of cynicism and other mechanisms of self-preservation.
Text by Philip Pihl, art historian