Nanna Riis Andersen
Formation Gallery
12 Jan 2024 – 02 Mar 2024
Formation Gallery is pleased to present Nanna Riis Andersen's first solo exhibition in the gallery Sti Vild Sti - about life's paths, turns, coincidences, and decisive moments. Getting lost, losing your direction, standing at a crossroads, and maybe finding your way through it all in the end.
Nanna Riis Andersen's works move between recognition and abstraction, form and dissolution, together many layers and overlaps create dreamlike landscapes. Both when it comes to painting and sculpture, Riis Andersen works in a predominantly abstract style with references to the body and nature.
Large watercolor paintings on paper, paintings on walls, canvas and silk fabric, silver chains with sculptural elements, and silver-cast words unite in creating a dreamlike vision – the moment just before falling asleep floating between consciousness and dream.
In an interaction between the abstract and the concrete, the inner landscape and the exterior, the near and the distant, Riis Andersen creates poetic close-up images of a shoulder, a leg, and a piece of clothing, which before our eyes seems to transform into diffuse landscapes, only to then take its shape again. A fold in a sleeve becomes a gentle hill that meanders, other textile drapes become lakes that wander and paths that find their way.
Water is a pervasive element in Riis Andersen's works. Water as a connecting element between bodies and nature. Water as a necessity for life. Before we are born, we are surrounded by water, our body consists in large parts of water, and most of the earth is covered by water. Water is in us, and around us. Water as a theme and material is reinforced on several levels; partly through watercolor - in a series of watercolors that outline a new direction in the artist's practice - and on silk that waves through the room, as well as on the wall in a pigment and water-based mural.
Like a hanging arrow, creepers, or nerve pathways, silver chains hang down from the ceiling, with words and symbols that connect us to nature, our ancestors, and our history – what we come from and what we will become. Like a silent echo that calls to us. For Riis Andersen, the chains also create associations with jewelry – heirlooms that bind people together. In the same way, the clothes that fold around the characters, Riis Andersen paints also hide a story about the person who wore them. Sti Vild Sti is both about getting lost and about finding your way – in everyday life and your dreams, about belonging and breaking away.
Nanna Riis Andersen (b.1985) graduated from the Jutland Academy of Art in 2012, and has exhibited alone and in groups at galleries and exhibition venues in Denmark and abroad. Among other things, she has participated in the JCE Biennale in 2015 and 2017 in Denmark, Italy and France, and has exhibited at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning and Møstings Hus. In 2020, Riis Andersen received Sven Hols' grant.