Dear Miaojin

In her exhibition, Dear Miaojin, the Danish artist Margrethe Odgaard presents us with her sensorial and poetic exploration of the relationship between colour and literature. Inspired by the passion and vulnerability in Qiu Miaojin’s novel, Last Words From Montmartre, unfolding through a series of 20 letters between Tokyo and Paris, Odgaard has conceived the exhibition as a fictive, epistolary dialogue with the late Taiwanese writer, presenting a series of textile works entitled Letter One, Two, Three, etc.

Intrigued by the interplay between colours and written text, Odgaard wonders how effectively colours engage with our soul and thoughts compared to the written words. In response, the artist has crafted a series of textile works, designed to evoke sensations in both mind and senses. Delicately unfolded like ample letters with visible folds, the works are articulated through two different types of textiles and techniques: Lean egg tempera hand-painted on cotton canvas and reactive dye on silk organza. Through the coloured textile surfaces, the former opaque and dense with flat colour fields, the latter soft and ephemeral with transparent colour graduations, Odgaard subtly explores the poetic colour references and atmospheric phrases found throughout the pages, such as… “Their golden, chestnutbrown hair dampened by the rain, glittered in the sunset…” Or… “I had arrived at the edge of a sea of fire.” In a moving letter to the late writer, Odgaard further unveils her poetic enterprise: “Colours serve as my language to communicate with you, and while the content may be enigmatic, it invites you to extract something meaningful, akin to savouring the flavour of individual words in a poem, even if the full meaning remains elusive.”

Born in 1978 on the Thyholm peninsula in Denmark, Margrethe Odgaard lives and works in Elsinore, north of Copenhagen. Odgaard obtained a master’s degree in textile art from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, design section in 2005, and pursued additional studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. Odgaard’s main focus is on colour research and perception, and the artist works with colour as a complete sensory experience, concentrating on its interaction with light, materials and space, thus aiming to better understand the way we experience and connect emotionally with the world around us.

Margrethe Odgaard’s works are represented in numerous museum collections, such as the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (United States); Designmuseum Danmark (Denmark); Röhsska Design Museum (Sweden); Designmuseo Helsinki (Finland) and Trapholt Museum of Modern Art (Denmark). Several solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her including the Willumsens Museum (Denmark); Röhsska Museum (Sweden); Designmuseo Helsinki (Finland) and Munkeruphus (Denmark). The artist has received various prestigious awards, including two Wallpaper Awards (Best Use of Color, 2020 and Green Product of the Year, Re-wool for Kvadrat, 2019); Designer of the Year / Design Awards of Danish Interior Magazines, 2019; Ole Haslunds Arts Foundation Prize, 2018; Torsten & Wanja Söderberg Prize 2016, Albertsen Foundation’s Honorary Award, 2022; The Art, Design, Architecture Prize 2023 from Einar Hansen’s Foundation, and the 2024 Prize of Honor from The Anne Marie Telmányi and Carl Nielsens Foundatio

Dear Miaojin: MARGRETHE ODGAARD

Installation shots

About the Artist

Exhibition Catalogue

Margrethe Odgaard

Cookie preferences

Mailing List SIGN-UP