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In the autumn of 2021, during the Covid 19 pandemic, Hanne Friis is at the Cité des Arts in Paris for four months. Her small flat near the Seine is overflowing with materials bought at the Sacre Coeur. She is preparing her solo exhibition at the Vigeland Museum, which will take place in 2022/23. Outside, the pandemic is in full swing. The homeless and their temporary beds are more visible and the artist notices the contrast between the nonchalant elegance of the city and its dilapidated streets. With the work Helvete (‘Hell’) by the artist Gustav Vigeland in mind, she visits the Rodin Museum and contemplates The Gates of Hell. In a creative outburst, Friis creates about fifteen works over a period of twelve months for her exhibition at the Vigeland Museum, acclaimed by the critics. From 1 April to 17 June, Galerie Maria Wettergren will present a selection of important works from the Vigeland Museum together with other major pieces in the exhibition Torrent.
The title of the exhibition refers to the movements, fluids, forces and transformations that are at the very core of Friis’s work. Hanne Friis (b. 1972) is known for her important textile sculptures, which are created using a handmade folding and sewing technique. Dense layers of folded fabric transform the material into a compressed mass that unfolds sculpturally in space. These abstract forms draw on an imaginary world ranging from the body to nature. “I have been working with the same themes since I was an art student, it’s all about how we as humans are connected to nature, and, as nature, we are constantly changing, which eventually leads us to death. It’s a kind of processing of this insight, that life and death are connected.”
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Artworks
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Hanging from the ceiling, such as The Sky Is The Limit or Dance, or on stands, such as La Vague or Flood, Friis’s dense works unfold in the air or on the floor as presences, as bodies. In the words of the artist: “In many ways, the sculptures are bodies: dishevelled figures, compact creations or bundles thrown onto a steel frame, their forms never fully resolved, a fold that is about to break, a swollen bump. The materials circulate, as do the idioms - folds, waves, craters, spirals, circles. An eternal dance. ”Friis’s sculptures are made in dense layers, meticulously stitched by the artist’s hand, compressing the fabric into a sculptural mass. The time-consuming aspect of this technique is essential; “Time is an important aspect of my work. I think I need this concentrated, slow and time-consuming, but still energetic and physical work to think and, at the same time, not to think.” In places, the material springs from the body of the work, like little eruptions, organic growths. The abstract forms that emerge from Friis’s work refer as much to the cycles of nature as to the various forms and movements of the body. The forms seem to be inhabited by a growing presence, sometimes weighed down by folds of skin.Friis does not stop at imitating the laws
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About the artist
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Exhibition Catalogue
TORRENT: Hanne Friis
Past exhibition