curated by Tone Bonnén
 
Maria Zahle (b.1979, Copenhagen) received a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art (2005) and a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools (2009), both in London, the city where she was based as an artist for several years, and where her artistic practice developed and matured. The use of shape, color, and space that Zahle deploys in her works, took form in London, her practice informed by artists such as the British sculptor Phyllida Barlow, who taught Zahle at the Slade.

That said, Zahle has been living in Copenhagen since 2015, where she quickly engaged with the Danish art scene. Zahle is not “just” a visual artist – she also co-runs exhibition spaces, publishes poetry collections, organises music festivals, plays in a band, and invites others into her home, her studio, her garden, her summer house, and her exhibitions, making these spaces available for the expression and creativity of chosen colleagues and collaborators.
At Alice Folker Gallery, Maria Zahle is exhibiting SOLO, and this is Zahle’s first solo presentation at a Copenhagen gallery. In the exhibition she presents four series of works, that all encapsulate central components of her artistic practice.
 
Color is a crucial element in Zahle’s work. Recently, Zahle has begun to grow plants such as indigo and madder, enabling her to produce pigments and dye paper and yarn with homemade colors. In the process of making her own dyes, the engagement with color has extended beyond how it feels, appears, and functions within a work, to also become about an awareness of the biological components and chemical processes of color.

The first work confronting a viewer within the exhibition is the large, central wall painting AWASH, taking up a whole wall, putting color itself front and center. The surface is hand-painted by Zahle with her home-manufactured pigments. It is a “monochromatic” pink, but as it is applied by hand, it vibrates in unexpected ways. The inconsistencies of the application introduces color as something alive and breathing.

Moving further into the exhibition, another wall features a wash of blue, functioning as a background for FLINT, a series of framed paper collages. These works present another central path in Zahle’s practice, exploring variations of interacting shapes. Each of the hand-dyed paper sheets are cut, making a unique figure. The paper pieces are then mounted on top of each other in constructions that create new forms and activate the negative space. As a signature move, Zahle uses a small torn piece of tape as a fastening device on the collages, functioning less as a pragmatic solution, and more as a subtle touch pointing at the process that goes into the making of the works.

In the two remaining work series presented Zahle continues to emphasize the method of production as something that leaves a visible, tangible trace in the final work.

In the series TABLE TOP PICTURE PLANE, eight works on paper repetitively trace the journey of a hand and pencil across a single sheet of paper. The pencil pushes across the surface, move by move, displacing and remaking its own depiction. The outlines of pencil shavings created along the way are colored-in with watercolor, highlighting the work and materiality of both hand and pencil.

Four woven linen pieces are either hung on the wall or presented on ramp-like pedestals on the floor. Their display structures are integral to the visual experience of the works. Cast bronze rods, from which the woven material hangs, serve both a practical purpose, as well as performing a sculptural role. Cast bronze hands hold the satin-woven linen works on the floor ramps in place. Forming part of the bronze rod is also a cast of the artist’s hand, allowing the works to gesture at how a hand is both maker and holder of the work.  

The woven works, and Zahle’s practice as a whole, have a close relationship to the presence of a body. Zahle’s loom is constructed to fit a human form, the woven pieces are sized to depict a human figure, and the process itself requires an active, working body in order to push, step, and shuttle the materials across the loom. Zahle includes this physical and creative body as a motif, depicting it as both freely flowing limbs, and as outlines of an autonomous body in its entirety.

In this exhibition Zahle insists on the body and the process of making as unavoidable prerequisites of the work – and as decisive for the images and imprints we all leave on the world.  

The exhibition is generously supported by Grosserer L. F. Foghts Fond