COPENHAGEN.- On Friday January 9th Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art opened its doors to the exhibition Moon Skin Lucid Walk with three women artists, each with their own distinctive visual language. We have invited the Danish artists Kirstine Roepstorff and Evren Tekinoktay and the Italian artist Carol Rama to exhibit together for the first time. With Roepstorff and Tekinoktay, both born in 1972, and Rama, who was born in 1918, the exhibition presents a significant area of contemporary art, which also looks back at the work of Rama as a key forerunner.

Despite the differences between the individual artists, an affinity between their works can clearly be sensed. Not necessarily an affinity that can be defined, but one that becomes immediately apparent when their works are exhibited together. For all three artists, tactility and materiality are central elements in their works, which move from the seductive, powerful and expressive, to the delicately sensual. Another shared aspect of their work is the use of collage, appropriation, a highly personal use of colour and – especially for Tekinoktay and Rama – a focus on the theme of gender. All three artists make the sensual significant and express something intellectually meaningful in a bodily appealing and visually captivating form.

The Danish artist Kirstine Roepstorff is best known for her powerful, visual collages with political undertones and multiple, packed narrative layers. In Moon Skin Lucid Walk she exhibits several brand-new works, which at first glance do not resemble the works she is usually associated with in Denmark. These works represent a development of her collage technique, here simplified and condensed to its essence. Her talent in composition and deep understanding of colour schemes are still clearly present, here in a more stringent, simpler expressive form. Her works are still primarily large-scale, but use fewer materials, with brass forming a recurrent element in many of the more recent works.

During recent years Roepstorff has focussed on the creation of stringent, three-dimensional, sculptural works, whilst retaining her characteristic collage aesthetic. Content-wise, more existential issues are in focus. Works with titles like Horizon of the Moving Minds (2014) and Lucid Dream Cabinets (2014) explore different states and lulls, transitions, movement, and consciousness in space and time. Central to the works are the relationships that form us as human beings, and which impact directly on how we meet the world we surround ourselves with. For some time she has worked with the phenomenon of a reverberating tone: “With the tone as a vibration I attempt to give formlessness a form that can be seen by the eye”, as Roepstorff explains in relationship to several of the works in the exhibition. It is some years since Denmark has experienced such a major presentation of Roepstorff’s works, and we are delighted to be able to reveal the direction her art has subsequently taken.

Evren Tekinoktay has always been interested in gender issues, or as she explains: “I work with gender science fiction – where gender collapses or disintegrates”. Her works are primarily created using cuttings of visual materials and painted surfaces. For the Turkish-born, Danish artist, however, the works have the character of paintings with elements of collage, rather than the reverse. The works are minutely executed and highly detailed, with a materiality that seems simultaneously impulsive and highly conscious. A specific characteristic of Tekinoktay’s works is her use of pastel colours, almost always supplemented by black. Her collages often play on kitsch, and for the artist are about exploring what she calls ‘female mimics’ in figures she describes as tragic beauties at the edge of disintegration. She has worked with collage since she was four years old, and says that cutting the world into pieces has always been necessary in order to reassemble it anew.

Tekinoktay is also known for her lingerie shop, an artistic project she worked on for nine years before ending it in 2013. In this exhibition, Tekinoktay presents a series of brand-new works that have never been shown before, including – a new medium for the artist – several video works like CLOSET, in which she transfers the technique of collage to the medium of video and film. In addition, she exhibits six brand-new neon reliefs, another new medium that can be experienced for the first time in the exhibition.

The visual universe of Carol Rama is quirky, sometimes transgressive, and operates at the juncture of the poetic and the neurotic. She is best known for her expressive and explicit watercolours of body parts and naked bodies, which she painted in a highly personal, grotesque and controversial style during the 1930s and 1940s, and again in the 1980s. During the interwar years, her works were seen as highly offensive and indecent and were, for a period, censored by the Italian authorities. After this, her work took a more formalist, abstract direction, and she experimented with different materials including the rubber of bicycle inner tubes, a material relating to her childhood and her father’s bicycle shop in Torino.

Rama did not have any kind of international breakthrough until 1980, prior to which despite her long career as an artist she had been more or less unknown beyond Italy’s borders. After years of relative obscurity, today she has almost iconic status and is a major source of inspiration for numerous younger artists. Her works have been exhibited at art institutions like Stedelijk in Amsterdam, ICA in Boston and Nottingham Contemporary, and in 2003 she won a Golden Bear at the Venice Biennale. She currently has a major retrospective at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, an exhibition which will later be shown at Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and finally at GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Torino. Due to this, MOON SKIN LUCID WALK only includes a small selection of Rama’s works, which we hope will inspire visitors to continue to explore her work.

Moon Skin Lucid Walk is a presentation of the art of Roepstorff and Tekinoktay, accompanied by the compelling and unconventional universe of Carol Rama. The exhibition serves as a reminder of the potential held by the material and tactile aspects of art at a time when contemporary art is often seen (and is criticised) as being highly conceptual and idea-based in its approach and form. The exhibition represents a happy reunion with Roepstorff and Tekinoktay exploring new expressive forms, and a new encounter for most with the art of Carol Rama.

The exhibition can be seen until March 1st.