ISHØJ.- How can we retain our essential humanity in a world where hope and courage are constantly beset by cruelty and despair? What do we do when children are robbed of their lives in war? And how do we say goodbye to this world, poised between love and the abyss?

These are some of the weighty and highly topical questions raised by Ursula Reuter Christiansen – one of Denmark’s most significant living artists – in her installations and paintings in the exhibition I Am Fire and Water.

Says curator Dorthe Juul Rugaard: ‘Ursula Reuter Christiansen is one of Denmark’s greatest contemporary artists. She is a keen observer of the times in which we live, and she uses her art to say important and poignantly relevant things about the world we share while world history is being written before our eyes.’

Over the course of more than six decades, Ursula Reuter Christiansen (b.1943 in Trier, Germany) has enriched the art world with works in which beauty wrestles with the demonic and light meets darkness. Her narrative, expressive, and poetic works reflect the human condition while also speaking directly to the political and climatic crises unfolding in the world right now.

‘Ursula Reuter Christiansen is in a league of her own, and the rest of Europe is beginning to see that too. Her prominence as an artist is matched by her feminist credentials; for example, she was a leading activist of the Redstockings movement in Denmark. As an artist, she has upheld a feminist point of view in her criticism and her outlook on the world,’ continues Dorthe Juul Rugaard.

‘Having said that, Ursula Reuter Christiansen has also expanded her scope and reach beyond the gender debate and is now more concerned with humanity as such: in her art, she embraces our existential conditions on this globe, a world in a state of crisis – not only as regards the climate, but also in relation to atrocities such as the war in Gaza, where the children are the main victims.’

The exhibition I am Fire and Water is an impressive feat on the part of Ursula Reuter Christiansen, a tour de force that presents installations and paintings from the earliest years of her career in the 1960s to the present day. Brand new works will be created especially for the exhibition at ARKEN.

Ursula Reuter Christiansen invites audiences on a journey through seven installations that reflect various facets of life. The exhibition ranges from the colossal installation Rotten Eggs Against Bombs to Washed Out Faces, the latter consisting of white sheets with faces painted onto them: here, trauma and pain have been scrubbed and washed out and the demons hung out to dry. Among the new installations is Es Ist Zu Spät (It Is Too Late), which invites visitors along on the artist’s personal journey through the fog – perhaps ending in a farewell to the world.