Anne Langgaard
21 Nov 2025 – 31 Jan 2026
Formation Gallery presents Courage lives in quiet gestures – a solo exhibition by Danish artist Anne Langgaard, who with great precision and sensitivity explores everyday life as an existential space where courage is found in the quiet and often overlooked movements of care. The exhibition insists that strength and courage do not only manifest in the spectacular, but also in repetition, persistence, and the soft labour that holds human relations and communities together.
Langgaard turns her gaze toward the acts that are rarely celebrated but form the foundation of our lives: a plaster placed on a wound, a lovingly prepared meal, a blanket draped over a tired body, a clean dishcloth in hand. In the exhibition, these seemingly banal gestures acquire sculptural weight and poetic dimension. What is usually overlooked is made visible—not to dramatize, but to highlight the love embedded in the everyday.
The works materialize presence and repetition. Butter curls cast in bronze act as small monuments to care and rhythm; a hot-water bottle in bronze stands as a quiet yet insistent testimony to comfort and healing; dishcloths cast in aluminium preserve traces, movements, and a nearly choreographic relation to time and touch. A blanket bears the words “Det bliver godt igen” (“It will be okay again”)—a gesture of warmth, time, and faith in the future.
The exhibition also includes a series of works that examine the everyday through sculptural and material transformations of familiar objects, uniting humour and gravity, poetry and precision. Among them are marble cutting boards engraved with reminders, where sentences appear both fragile and insistent in the weight of the stone; traces of chance materialized in aluminium; and a palm-shaped pool float’s cupholder transformed in bronze into a quiet yet powerful image of memory and the weight of dreams. A work consisting of thousands of matchsticks forms the phrase “keep away from fire”—a sharp, poetic, and humorous commentary on both warning and attraction, care and risk.
Through these gestures, Langgaard stages the everyday with understated humour and a keen material sensibility, where lightness and seriousness coexist. Together, the works create a space in which the wordless language of care, the rhythms of daily life, and the quiet persistence of poetry can emerge.
Courage lives in quiet gestures thus becomes an invitation to sense and think differently about what we often take for granted. The exhibition points to the fact that courage does not always make noise. That being soft in a world that often celebrates hardness is an act of strength. It honours what is overlooked—the care, the rhythm, and the everyday that holds everything together. It reminds us that strength can be found in the quiet, the loving, and the small gestures that keep the world intact.
Anne Langgaard graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Her practice revolves around the materiality and poetic potential of the everyday, where small objects and gestures are elevated with an eye for vulnerability, humour, and gravity. She is a member of the artist-run exhibition space Sydhavn Station in Copenhagen and has exhibited both in Denmark and internationally.
Opening 21 November, 5–8 PM. The exhibition is on view at Formation Gallery through 31 January 2026.
