Ragna Bley

Opening reception: Thursday 12 November, 6–8pm

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Oyster, Ragna Bley’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, comprising a new series of sculptures and large-scale paintings. The exhibition plays with borders and categorisations – where a painting stops, where one environment gives way to another and how we perceive what belongs where.

Bley’s practice incorporates layered painterly techniques. The artist uses spray paint, transparent mediums, marbling, oil and acrylic, creating a contrast of weights across her canvases. In Bley’s paintings, borders are both fixed and porous. Colour seeps into the canvas and spreads, moving from one area into the next, pooling, thinning out and taking hold elsewhere. The shapes in the paintings appear to push towards the edge of the canvas; a straight, constructed limit that the paint can reach but does not cross.

Bley paints with her canvases laid flat on the floor, and uses salt, snow and ice in the process of applying paint to the surface. As the ice melts, the final form of the work is determined by time, and a negotiation of chance and control. Bley’s compositions are revealed through the act of mark-making, driven by intuitive movement, capturing a sense of familiarity that nonetheless remains elusive.

Alongside these new paintings, sculptural pillars punctuate the gallery space, echoing the structure of the building around them. A series of smaller ceramics, tactile objects that fit into a palm, mirroring the uncertain figurations that often appear in Bley’s work, cling to the sculptures and scatter across the floor. The works reflect an ecological unease; the inability to fully see and understand the intricate systems around us and the blurred lines between the natural and human-made. Bley’s works oscillate between their materiality – painting, canvas, clay – and, much like peripheral vision, reach for phenomena beyond our grasp.