RAGNA BLEY

Working with painting, sculpture, text and performance, Bley’s experimental practice oscillates between the familiar and alien, between abstraction and representation. Presenting a new series of paintings, the exhibition draws from the artist’s longstanding interest in various narratives found within biology, literature and science-fiction.

Viridian Land

Some things lose their colour when the sun is
stark, green leaves become silvery, watching it
all from behind tinted glasses
Adapting to your light
Walk us through that tunnel of green
Imagining another place, paradise
Heat
Wetness
Clothes being very damp
Smelling of the wetlands
Mosquitos I have no immunity to
On the sterile winter city tundra
I’m trying to remember to recreate
A landscape, I will inevitably fail

It’s also about sex
(I think)
How can we look at what’s growing so lush
without also noticing our body temperature and
difference between thigh and toe
And feel the hurt of that seed cracking
hearing it grow through the night.

Some say that may be the only way though I
think there are others
In the toilet booth overhearing
Some sad
Some euphoric

Some sand will eventually form a heap.

Île-d’Aix - The Wind
Blows the colours off
(And the oyster farms)

You viewed in the tinted light of the tent canvas.
Your skin then green and yellow. The sun making
it very warm
Black hairs like hyphens
Connecting islands of pure skin

Landmass of melting interior of that bar in
Salvador, Brazil
We sailed yet nothing moved
Ant trails keeping track

But titles then (naming)
It’s that hurt
It’s that time
That place whose only smell I recall
And peripheral bruising
(So inept
In-depth
Mooring)

Umbrella through water
Can it be folded still?

Ragna Bley (b. 1986, Uppsala, Sweden) received her BFA at the National Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo, in 2011 and her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London in 2015. Solo and two-person presentations include: Stranger’s Eye, Kunstnernes Hus (2022); Ragna Bley & Inger Ekdahl, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (2020); Zooid, Kunsthuset Kabuso, Øystese (2018); Zooid, Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo (2017) and Lay Open, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin (2017). Selected group exhibitions include: The Hour of Reckoning, Henie Onstad Art Center, Bærum (2021); Tempo Tempo Tempo, Kistefosmuseet, Jevnaker (2019); The Moderna Exhibition 2018, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2018); The Oslo Museum of Contemporary Art, Kunsthall Oslo (2017); Nomadic Images, Museum of Applied Arts, Vilnius (2016). Her work is included in the permanent collections of David Roberts Art Foundation, London, Henie Onstad Art Center, Bærum, Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo, Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö, Kistefosmuseet, Jevnaker, Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo.