-
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.”
-
Installation shots
©Grégory Copitet -
Artworks
-
-
About the Artist
-
-
-
Exhibition Catalogue
Dear Miaojin: MARGRETHE ODGAARD
Past exhibition
