Sóley Ragnarsdóttir
Formation Gallery
25 Apr 2025 – 31 May 2025
Formation Gallery is pleased to present She Likes to Collect Rocks – the second solo exhibition by Danish-Icelandic artist Sóley Ragnarsdóttir at the gallery.
Through a tactile and reflective practice, Ragnarsdóttir explores the relationship between humans and their immediate surroundings – including natural materials, consumer objects, and marine debris, as well as the affective dimension of repetition inherent in the act of collecting.
At the heart of the exhibition is the concept of Endlessness – understood as both an aesthetic and existential state, simultaneously structural and temporal. Repetition and intricate patterns emerge as epistemological tools for experiencing and engaging with the world. Through meticulous processes – thousands of brushstrokes, serial impressions, and material manipulations – Ragnarsdóttir insists on a slowness that both challenges and resists today’s accelerated image culture.
A central motif in the exhibition is the transformation of ocean plastic into sculptural objects. The material, collected along the shores of Thy by the environmental organization Strandet, consists of fragments of fish boxes – findings already charged with ambivalent meanings. In Ragnarsdóttir’s practice, these objects appear as paradoxical hyperobjects: captivating, strangely familiar, and at the same time by-products of our desire and global overconsumption. (Perhaps something other than simply calling them beautiful?)
Ragnarsdóttir’s practice breaks with ornamental aesthetics for its own sake. Her works reconsider the inherent patterns of nature and the value we attribute to acts such as collecting. Cockle shells, bird pairs, and fragments of amber appear as microcosmic reflections of a desire for coexistence – across species, time, and materiality.
Sóley Ragnarsdóttir (b. 1991, DK/IS) is based in Thy and graduated from Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (2014–2019). Over the past decade, Ragnarsdóttir has developed a practice that navigates the intersection between the major global challenges facing our environment and a craft-based, ornamentation-focused tradition. She recently exhibited at Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum in Reykjavik (April 2024), Städel Museum, Historisches Museum, and Gallerie Jean Claude Maier (Frankfurt), Kunstforum Farmstadt, O-Overgaden (Copenhagen), and Augustiana Kunsthal & Kunstpark (Sønderborg). In the winter of 2025, she was nominated for the Icelandic Art Prize.
