We are proud to present Helene Blanche (DK) in her first solo exhibition at Gether Contemporary. Helene Blanche is known for her incredibly beautiful textile patterns, with which she has gained great international attention. But before her final designs, with their tactile, timeless and poetic expression, lies a great artistic investigative process.
Here, Helene Blanche works with ink on silk and creates dreamy motifs with a nod to Japanese art, where light and shadow meet in inner images. Sometimes dark and intensely deep in color, and other times light and spherical, to be replaced again by delicate repetitive patterns in several dimensions.
In the exhibition, Blanche presents a series of works where she lets color unfold organically on the surface, while at the same time there is a clear intention in the dialogue between the colours and their movement. In addition, one can experience a series of pleated works in folded silk, which create a landscape of light and shadow, rhythmically defined by ink dots, which create a form of topography, which in turn act as anchor points for the gaze. The play between light and dark created by the folds facilitates a movement that leads the eye around the surface, and allows the viewer to fall into a meditative state, where images open up and lead the viewer on an inner journey.
Blanche collects, among other things, inspiration in Japanese art, which, like her works, focuses more on an emotional and tactile sensation, rather than a narrative, which is otherwise dominant in Western art. In Japanese calligraphy, the line is considered an extension of the person, where each individual stroke becomes a marking of the artist's inner state, and comes to reflect the artist's being. Blanche also works with lines and intentionality to create a special emotional sensuality in the work, by creating deep contrasts between light and dark. The same intentionality is included in her pleated works, where a parallel can be drawn to origami, a traditional Japanese art of folding, where the silk is folded into a pattern that gives it a new structure and volume. The fabric goes from being a surface to taking on a sculptural character that enters into a tactile dialogue with the spatial.
A reference can be made to the American artist Agnes Martin (b. 1922, CA) whose more humane and soft approach to minimalism bridged styles and created a school for a new approach to art. Among other things, Agnes Martin formed grid patterns of neatly placed lines and dots, as a meditation on the materiality of the surface and pointed towards a new abstraction. Her repetitive lines were not machine-made, but clearly applied by hand. Martin worked to get to the essence of the work of art, a form of pure being in art, a special space for the viewer to introspect through tactile sensations.
Through these new series of works, we are invited for the first time into Blanche's intuitively creative universe, where she exposes an extreme sensibility towards color and tmateriality, and where we are encouraged to let go of fixed notions and let ourselves be carried away by sensing the works.
Kilde:
Gether Contemporary
Gether Contemporary