The Inkwell / Blækhuset 09.09.10 - 09.01.11 at TRAPHOLT

The Inkwell
Large charcoal drawings, paintings, ceramics, graphic works and works on paper made with felt tipped pen and ink. Cathrine Raben Davidsen is one of the central, younger artists on the contemporary Danish art scene. For this exhibition Raben Davidsen has created a series of new works expressing a more intense and dramatic tone than in her previous work. The motifs centre around transformation and death. In 2008 Raben Davidsen was presented at the solo exhibition White Ink referring to woman’s invisible voice in history. The works for The Inkwell, in contrast with the white ink, are more intense. “Ink and charcoal cannot be erased once they are on the paper. Ink has a will of its own, ink is something uncontrollable, something independent,” Raben Davidsen explains.

Transformation and identity
Cathrine Raben Davidsen’s works touch upon transformation, identity and human relationships. Faces and figures weave together to an extent that makes it difficult to determine where one person stops and another starts. The unfinished is a formal device which brings to Raben Davidsen’s work a fragile, dreaming character – but this is also to be related to the content of the subjects. Not only can it be difficult to determine their gender, but the transitory line and the many overlapping layers can also shroud their identity. Raben Davidsen provides no clear answer, preferring to line up rows of possible narratives – and leave it to the observer to complete.

Fables and tales
Cathrine Raben Davidsen has drawn inspiration from Japanese and Indian fables – among other sources – in the creation of the works for The Inkwell. Even tough the works have a figurative expression they cannot be read as a continuing story. Only in a very few instances does a specific tale provide the starting point for a particular work. Raben Davidsen is much more absorbed in the fable’s use of messages and levels of meaning and by the transition that is often part of the story. Raben Davidsen regards the mythological tales as a universal language, leading the observer beyond the story to the timelessness of life itself. She herself says: “Myth is a comedy, like a novel. It is a charade which sets the imagination free and asks: what if...? Fortunately, art is liberated from the bonds of sense and logic. It is continually suggesting and combining new forms of understanding and insight.”

Cathrine Raben Davidsen was born in 1972. She lives and works in Copenhagen. She has studied at art academies in Florence and The Hague, and in 2003 graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
Raben Davidsen has on several occasions shown that she is not artist content with confining herself to a single medium. Her oeuvre includes painting, drawing, graphics, ceramics and – most recently – sculpture. She has produced a number of award winning publications, and in 2008 she executed a monumental permanent wall decoration at Restaurant Nimb in Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen.

Raben Davidsen has had solo exhibitions at Horsens Museum of Art, Vestsjælland’s Museum of Art and the Martin Asbæk Gallery in Copenhagen. She has also taken part in several group exhibitions in Denmark and abroad.
Raben Davidsen is represented at The National Gallery of Denmark, Horsens Museum of Art, and collections at the New Carlsberg Foundation – as well as in a number of other important public and private collections in Denmark and abroad.
In 2009 she received a grant of honour from the Niels Wessel Bagge’s Art Foundation Memorial Scholarship, and has been the recipient of several scholarships from the Danish State Art Foundation and the Danish Arts Council.

The exhibition is sponsored by Danish Art Workshops, Kopenhagen Fur, and the Toyota Foundation.
Cathrine Raben Davidsen is represented by Martin Asbæk Gallery