Fernisering den 6. juni 2024 på Horsens Kunstmuseum kl. 16.00 – 19.00. Alle er velkomne.
Det er med stor glæde, at vi kan byde velkommen til fernisering på særudstillingen Let Everything Happen to You på Horsens Kunstmuseum torsdag d. 6 juni 2024. Den omfattende retrospektive udstilling af Cathrine Raben Davidsen blev vist på Copenhagen Contemporary tidligere på året. På Horsens Kunstmuseum vises nu et stort udvalg fra udstillingen.
I udstillingen Let Everything Happen to You udfolder både malerier og tegninger helt nye sider af den danske billedkunstner Cathrine Raben Davidsens (f. 1972) markante kunstnerskab. Gennem et tværsnit af kunstnerens tre perioder fra – midt-halvfemserne (1995-1998), midt-10’erne (2015-2017) og nutid – viser udstillingen en personligt forankret side af Cathrine Raben Davidsens virke rundet af erfaringer som tab, identitetssøgen og transformation.
In a Thrilling New Show Artist Cathrine Raben Davidsen Explores the Beauty and Terror of Life By Laird Borrelli-Persson for Vogue
It’s easy to imagine surprise being the primary reaction of visitors to the mid-career survey of Cathrine Raben Davidsen’s work at Copenhagen Contemporary this week. This popular Danish artist is best known, and loved, for her beautiful, yet eerie works, many of them pretty portraits, drawn with a line that looks fragile, but which carries the weight of mythology. The beauty of these drawings takes the viewer into unexpected, often uncomfortable places, but none as dark as those on view in the new exhibition, “Let Everything Happen to You.” The exhibition opens at a time when many have a sense of hopelessness as to current events; at a time when glossy images of so-called perfection serve as pacifiers, but not cures.
Davidsen, who studied theology, is an artist whose process often starts with the creation of mind maps. She reads a lot and the title of the exhibition comes from a line of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke from the poem “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” It can be understood to be an admonition to embrace life in all its extremes and messiness, and Davidsen does this through her art.
While not organized as a retrospective or strictly by chronology, the exhibition moves from the personal to the universal, with a concentration on the works on paper created by the artist in the 1990s as she tried to come to grips with the death of her father, when she was just 13. A bisexual, he was one of the first Danes to die of AIDS. “All the works are made ten years after he died. I wasn’t ready, I didn’t know anything when I was 13,” she says. “I began painting as a way to connect to him because of the loss, and also the confusion. Everything was a secret, and it was so shameful.” It can be uncomfortable to look at these early works. They are controlled and wild at once, deliberate and emotional, with lines that are thick, raw, and coarse—primal screams on paper.
The decision to show this challenging work was a deliberate one by museum director Marie Laurberg and curator Aukje Lepoutre in coordination with the artist. “Giving a big show to a local artist means we want to contribute with an angle on her work which gives a new impression of it–and lifts it into new conversations,” says Laurberg. “Cathrine is a very technically skilled painter, and she does create works that really make your heart jump. But she has this other, more brutal side, which is maybe not always that obvious. We wanted to bring that side out more.”
“I really am known for those pretty pieces,” Davidsen admits. “But I’ ve always been interested in what lies beneath and the dark stories. I’ve always been attracted to the darkness.” Is there finally room for female artists to show work that isn’t conventionally beautiful? “I don’t want to necessarily answer that,” Davidsen responds. “I can only speak for myself, and for me, I’ve never been interested in my sex, or if I’m female or masculine. I think actually I’m more masculine than feminine in a sense, the way my brain works.”
Laurberg has a more direct perspective. “I want to show the next generations that women can–and should!–take the big stage,” stated the director who recently curated the Mamma Anderson exhibition at the Louisiana Museum. “A new generation is taking over leadership, and there is a strong sense that we are not here just to repeat the old music. For me it is pretty clear: I want to use my position to change the narrative for women in the art world. When I first started working in curatorial positions in large institutions 20 years ago,” she continued, “I repeatedly witnessed women artists being surpassed, undervalued, not invested in. This was not done on purpose, as part of some evil plan. It was based on deeply ingrained ideas in culture about the artist, what a genius looks like, and in the end–which stories are part of what we call the human condition.”
In the last few years, Davidsen has made a more visible move from the personal to the universal with her paintings of landscapes. “It began around the pandemic time, when nature was taking over us humans, in a sense. … Ever since The Vitruvian Man, the Leonardo da Vinci figure, the figure has been in the middle and the figure has been dominating the whole world. … Making the landscapes was a way of removing myself and all people from my work; I wanted to get rid of all the people and to give a voice to nature.”
All of the landscapes have the title “As above, so below,” which comes from an ancient text, and might suggest a Dantean reading. The largest work in the exhibition is a dense, tactile painting based on a satellite picture of destruction through war. “When people came in and saw the work when I was making it, they were like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.” When the viewers learned the title, “Crater Scar,” their opinions changed, says the artist. “It’s interesting to play on that—the beauty and the horror of it—and that’s also what’s the essence of the Rilke poem. He’s saying, ‘Don’t let yourself lose me, whether it be beauty or terror, you have to go into it.’”
In one drawing in the show, a hand is reaching down to lift another up, in a gesture of welcoming, of succor, of assistance. “Give me your hand,” is the closing line of the Rilke poem that guides the show. Davidsen’s exhibition is similarly a lifeline. It might not always be easy to hold onto, but it offers a valuable and moving connection.
Cathrine Raben Davidsen’s “Let Everything Happen to You” is up at Copenhagen Contemporary from January 25 through May 12 2024
Portraits of Cathrine Raben Davidsen, 2024. Photo: Casper Wackerhausen-Sejersen; make-up, Anne Staunsager.
Med menneskekroppen og det tidløse landskab som metaforer for tilværelsens uundgåelige transformation indtager den danske billedkunstner Cathrine Raben Davidsen CCs udstillingsrum med et væld af ladede og intense billeder.
Udstillingen Let Everything Happen to You er den mest omfattende retrospektive soloudstilling af kunstnerens arbejde til dato. Den kaster lys over en mindre kendt og mere personlig del af Raben Davidsens praksis, der er rundet af erfaringer som tab, sorg og identitetssøgen. Gennem værkerne formidler kunstneren sin enorme maleriske spændvidde og følelsesmæssige kompleksitet, hvor undersøgelsen af menneskets sårbarhed og billedets kraft er i centrum.
FAMILIEPORTRÆTTER AF SORG Med hovedvægt på maleri og tegning samler udstillingen over 130 værker udvalgt fra tre af kunstnerens væsentligste perioder; midt 90’erne, midt 10’erne og nutid. En betydelig del af værkerne udstilles for første gang.
I udstillingens centrale rum vises den hidtil største samlede præsentation af Raben Davidsens værker fra 1990 ́erne, der portrætterer hendes familie, barndom og teenageår. I en ekspressionistisk stil spænder motiverne fra intime og psykologisk ladede portrætter over rå tegninger i olie, kul og blæk. Rummets hovedværk, maleriet Familie, skildrer en nøglebegivenhed i Raben Davidsens liv, nemlig det pludselige tab af faderen. Han døde af AIDS i 1985, da hun var 13 år gammel.
KUNSTEN SOM VIDNESBYRD Op gennem 2010’erne flytter Raben Davidsen sit fokus fra at udforske det personlige tab til at undersøge mere universelle spørgsmål om menneskelig eksistens og samhørighed. Samtidig begynder hun at male billeder, hvis indhold har mere politisk karakter. Ved at tage sine motiver direkte fra nyhedsstrømmens reportagefotografier taler værkerne direkte til vores samtid. I disse billeder af ødelagte landskaber, af kroppe og ansigter mærket af krig antager Raben Davidsen en position som betragter og medieret vidne og lader værkerne blive vidnesbyrd på vor tids udfordrede humanisme.
Titlen Let Everything Happen to You er lånt fra den østrigske poet Rainer Maria Rilkes digt Go to the Limits of Your Longing (1905). Digtet beskriver den ubærlige, men uundgåelige sidestilling af skønhed og lidelse, der definerer menneskets liv og historie. På samme måde udfordrer Raben Davidsen med sine malerier og tegninger sit publikum til at engagere sig i de følelsesmæssige dimensioner af sorg og tab. Hvordan håndterer vi de ting, der sker med os – og hvordan kommer vi videre derfra?
LET EVERYTHING HAPPEN TO YOU
Using the human body and the timeless landscape as metaphors for life’s inevitable transformation, the Danish artist Cathrine Raben Davidsen takes over CC’s Hall 3 with an array of charged and intense images.
Let Everything Happen to You is the most comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Raben Davidsen’s work to date, sheds light on a lesser known, more personal aspect of a practice shaped by experiences of loss, grief and the search for identity. Here, the artist conveys her vast painterly range and emotional complexity, exploring human vulnerability and the power of images.
FAMILY PORTRAITS OF GRIEF With an emphasis on painting and drawing, the exhibition brings together more than 130 works selected from three key periods of the artist’s career: the mid-1990s, the 2010s and the present. A substantial number of the works are shown for the first time.
The central room features the largest ever presentation of Raben Davidsen’s work from the 1990s, portraying her family, childhood and teenage years. Executed in an expressionist style, the works range from intimate, psychologically charged portraits to raw drawings in oil, charcoal and ink. The centrepiece, the painting Family, depicts a crucial event in the artist’s life, the sudden loss of her father to AIDS in 1985 when she was 13 years old.
ART AS TESTIMONY Over the course of the 2010s, Raben Davidsen shifts her focus from exploring her own personal loss to more universal questions of human existence and connection. At the same time, she begins to make paintings with more directly political content. Featuring subjects drawn from news photography, the works speak directly to our time. In her images of landscapes, bodies and faces devastated by war, Raben Davidsen occupies a position as observer and mediated witness, letting her art testify to the beleaguered humanism of our age.
The exhibition’s title is a line from a 1905 poem, Go to the Limits of Your Longing, by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The poem describes the unbearable yet inescapable combination of beauty and suffering at the heart of human life and history. Likewise, Raben Davidsen’s paintings and drawings challenge the viewer to engage with the emotional dimensions of grief and loss. How do we deal with the things that happen to us, and how do we move on?
ABOUT CATHRINE RABEN DAVIDSEN (b. 1972) Cathrine Raben Davidsen (b. 1972, Copenhagen) is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and previously studied at art academies in Italy and the Netherlands. Raben Davidsen has exhibited widely in Denmark and abroad. She has executed major commissions, and her work is in the collections of many museums and institutions. Throughout her career, she has won numerous awards and honorary grants. In 2015, she was appointed Knight of the Order of Dannebrog by Her Majesty Queen Margrethe.
New lithographs published on the occasion of the exhibition Let Everything Happen to You opening at Copenhagen Contemporary 25 January 2024. Write us for a full portfolio info@crdstudio.com
