TOTEM

TOTEM
Cathrine Raben Davidsen

Royal Copenhagen, Amagertorv 6, Copenhagen
February 8th – March 31th, 2019

Opening February 7th, 2019, Danish visual artist Cathrine Raben Davidsen is presenting her new solo exhibition Totem in the recently refurbished Royal Copenhagen flagship store at Amagertorv in Copenhagen. Totem is a product of Raben Davidsen’s two-year artistic collaboration with Royal Copenhagen. Staged as a total installation the exhibition presents a completely new body of work consisting of ceramics, drawings, paintings and an animation film, that are thematically inspired by prehistoric ceramics, animistic spirituality and totemism.

Royal Copenhagen has a long-standing tradition of working with artists dating back to the 1820s. In 1885, when the young architect Arnold Krog was appointed as the artistic director, Royal Copenhagen became eminently successful in its association with painters and sculptors who created both unique works and reproducibly works; a range of products which besides porcelain also came to encompass works in stoneware. Today the tradition lives on. Each year Royal Copenhagen invites Danish and international artists to experiment with the artistic potential and scope of ceramics in the company’s workshops at the factory in Glostrup. In the course of its almost 250-year history Royal Copenhagen has built up internationally leading expertise in porcelain and stoneware production; this is the legacy that the factory makes available to the artists, and the collaboration often leads to development for both parties.

“I am always moved when I see an artist’s work being modelled, painted and glazed in clay and then transformed in the firing process. The often imperfect life of a unique artwork thus acquires a distinctive power that moves me in the same way as a painting or a sculpture. All our collaborations with artists have their own soul although each of them works with the same basic materials and is supported by our own able craftspeople. This development work is a responsibility that has always been inherent in Royal Copenhagen, and the company has stood by it for centuries; we continue to support it and it thrives in the contemporary art world today,” says Creative Director Niels Bastrup.
Over the past two years Danish visual artist Cathrine Raben Davidsen has been associated with Royal Copenhagen, where she has experimented in close collaboration with the factory’s specialists on a variety of techniques, glazes and firing methods. Raben Davidsen has used modified versions of several of Royal Copenhagen’s historic glazes, for example Patrick Nordström’s “Oxblood glaze”. She has treated the glazes with oxides, and others have undergone a salt-firing in the thrower’s own kiln. The collaboration has resulted in an extensive range of unique ceramic works comprising vases, jars, jugs and plates. A selection of these works is now on show at the exhibition Totem.
Totem
As an entry point to the collaboration with Royal Copenhagen, Raben Davidsen has found inspiration in German Bellarmine stoneware from the 16th and 17th centuries and face-mask urns from the late Bronze Age. The characteristic feature of the ceramics, later known as Bartmann vases, was the vessel’s embedded motif of an old man’s bearded face on the neck of the bottle. Often, these containers were also used as occult witch bottles with the purpose of expelling evil spirits. By playfully adapting this stylistic expression to her own vases, Raben Davidsen introduces the association to the ghostly and spiritual in her work, surrounding the old tradition with a modern mystique.

The notion of transformation is a recurring concept in Raben Davidsen’s recent work. She sees the process of transformation as a basic condition of humanity – a continuum that connects us constantly and at multiple levels with our surrounding environments. What particularly interests Raben Davidsen is how we perceive and understand mankind’s relationship with nature and the spiritual world, drawing from how these relations are embedded in the ancient traditions of animistic religion. Animism is the belief that everything in nature, both the organic and the inorganic, has a soul in the same way as human beings. Thus, man can communicate with the contemplated nature and cultivate it. Among the animistic believers a totem is a worship that aims to gather and strengthen the group's identity and cohesion.

While the ceramic works in the exhibition clearly reference the historic Bartmann tradition, the drawings and paintings unfold a new, mysterious world of organisms, animals and other spiritual beings. Shadowy images of floating bodies, owls, deer, whales, and jellyfish move around in fluid, formless spaces, seemingly in constant flux, towards a new dimension.

By intuitively combining disparate pieces of knowledge taken from ritual practices, animistic belief systems, scientific research, anthropology, philosophy, etc. Cathrine Raben Davidsen explores the holistic connections having shaped relations of belief for millennia. Questioning the dualisms between nature and culture, physical and metaphysical, material and spiritual, real versus fiction, she asks how these relations can be examined anew in the modern society of our time.

Press material
Additional press material, artist resume, and high res images can be downloaded at CRD Totem 

Exhibition curator: Aukje Lepoutre Ravn

Photo credit: Anders Hviid

For more information please contact:
Aukje Lepoutre Ravn, Curator a.lepoutre.ravn@gmail.com / +45 20989423
Stine Holte Jensen, PR Manager Royal Copenhagen / stine.holte.jensen@fiskars.com / +45 21188304