Debris (I) - Lithograph
Debris (I) is part of a series of lithographs published by Edition Copenhagen in 2023, which accompany the exhibition Let Everything Happen to You at Copenhagen Contemporary. Feel free to contact us at info@crdstudio.com for a full portfolio of available prints from this series.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Cathrine Raben Davidsen
Let Everything Happen to You
Copenhagen Contemporary
26 January – 12 May 2024
Danish artist Cathrine Raben Davidsen presents her first major institutional survey exhibition, Let Everything Happen to You. Taking a retrospective view, the exhibition conveys the emotional complexity and range of the artist’s work, developed over three decades and rooted in experiences of loss, identity formation and transformation. The show brings together over 120 works created from the mid-1990s onwards, with an emphasis on painting and drawing. A significant number of works will be shown here for the first time.
Cathrine Raben Davidsen is known for her poetic and colour-saturated imagery, particularly her oil paintings on large canvases as well as more intimate formats such as drawings on paper, but also as installations, graphic works, and ceramics. Throughout her career, Raben Davidsen has used her art as a prism through which to explore and understand herself and her relationship to the world – often reflecting on the notion of metamorphosis.
Let Everything Happen to You highlights three of the artist’s most formative and productive periods: the mid-1990s (1995–98), the mid-2010s (2015–17) and the present. The exhibition mixes raw and evocative drawings with lavishly layered oil paintings that draw on both past and present narratives, personal memories and ancient mythologies, political events, and art historical references. Taking centre stage is the human being, the personal experience, and its artistic processing. The audience will have a unique opportunity to experience some of Raben Davidsen’s earliest works, including the series Family, which in a raw, psychological style, portrays her family and her childhood and teenage years.
Later in her career, landscapes, animals and plants have begun to emerge on Raben Davidsen’s canvases, as she has moved her focus from explorations of the personal to engaging more widely with universal questions about human existence and cohesion with the natural world. In this work, Raben Davidsen takes on a more critical and political position; something that can be seen in her latest paintings, which abstractly depict transformed landscapes and bodies scarred by war.