Dear Carmen, Dear Marie

A LETTER FROM NANNA FRIIS TO CARMEN HERERRA AND MARIE SØNDERGAARD LOLK

Today I looked at green and white, pale yellow and almost invisible blue, and a burgundy of death. These colours are yours. As any other shade or emotion, they’re also everyone else’s—they belong to no one only, but on some specific surfaces they emerged from you. Six decades separate your lives but somehow your languages, vivid and vague, approach each other. Their public visibility shares this century in a way as grotesque as the masculine blindness of the previous. 105 and 38 years of looking and adding to two different realities: paint, strength, peace, layers of attention. To look is to collect knowledge with your body: I want to do that, I want to open my eyes to the fact that you two are not similar, but to me, you seem braided together across oceans and means. This is not about me. This is about silence.

The history of femme is silence or silent or silencing (unfortunately for everyone), and while this history is a lie, it is also urgent and beautiful to insist on the power of the quiet. It can be enforced or deliberate and maybe this is where your eras divide you. A Cuban painter in an epicenter of male ego and quadratic dick: New York minimalism. A Danish painter in the 21st century Copenhagen softness. How severely 182

do surroundings affect expression? It seems obvious and naive to think: very. Your lines, Carmen, straight and radical and persistently unwatched, manifested themselves as a confident vitality years before the New York men came up with their geometry. Paintings as bright stings, definitive rather than fickle, “I will always be in awe of the straight line,” you said. The persistence of these lines and flat, strong colour; your productivity, your unquestionable entitlement; none of this is quiet, but the lack of eyes is silencing. I like to think that overall, you didn’t mind this, but I’m probably romanticizing the act of fighting gendered disregard. Probably indulging myself in imagining it as a calm and elevated practice, self-worth in abundance, because this is how your art looks. It demands gazes but didn’t get any for half a century, and in the mere outrageousness of that fact, it moves me to think of art existing without being seen. A strong-willed urge for aesthetics and making, not depending on visibility. Is this also to romanticise? This is the brutal reality of any femme wanting to shape her sensibilities until heartbreakingly recently. Evidently, the quiet doesn’t equal hesitation.

Isn’t painting the loudest of languages? For centuries, various editions of male, vir

tuous yelling covered the canvases, and ultimately it still does. Then and now, serene practices seem radical. Reduction, the anti-gesture, becomes striking. Marie, looking at your paintings feels like looking at absence. It feels elegant to sense the accurate peace, some kind of restraint in your delicate surfaces, while also noticing that these words don’t imply weakness or fragility.

The fragile rather lives in materials destined to crack: a beautiful resistance to the (masculine) yearn for eternity. Thinness and transparency and vague colours, expressions whose certain visibility still seems unafraid of not being seen. Is the tranquil even a vibe you pursue? Assumptions too entitled tend to make me uneasy—es- pecially my own. Ruptures in my confidence or a sincere love of doubt. I suppose that neither lack of confidence nor any tangible doubt affect your process. I don’t know anything about your process but it appears embedded in the accumulations and nonappearances in your work. To perceive how something became its form instead of see- ing the finished form only. How much effort does it take to leave the realm of the canvas, frame, and everything big? Maybe, presumably, a lessening of the ego cannot be decided or momentarily occupied as a counter position to the constant truth-claims of male art history; presum- ably it must be rooted in you and emerge from an effort similar to that of rain.

I’m thinking if perseverance is something you share, you both seem to work along the lines of almost stoic femininity, and this is not an attempt to diminish your art to a gender and binary blinkers: your concerns are global and true; they’re independent of time yet to some extent affected by the circumstance that the world was/ is of men. This circumstance is violent, but Carmen, you seem to show no signs of bitterness towards your contemporaries’ unforgivable ignorance (or you hide it very well). Either way, I admire it as a way of existing “above” the rest that I would never be able to access. I admire your reductions separated by style and methods and half a century; the material and figurative sparse- ness—is it meant for investigative gazes or a sensibility beyond looking for the loud? Opaque, lasting, and unlasting thresholds of other possibilities for painting than mere ego forever.

Dear Marie, dear Carmen, you are your own and separate forces of quietness, distinction, and considered making, but across everything that sets you apart, do you also recognise a mutual relation to absence? Absence of matter, absence of eyes. This, to me, is vulnerable beauty. ◻

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5. Elizabeth Peyton Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, 2015, original lithograph, printed on 300g Velin d’Arches paper, 82 x 63,5 cm. 20 ex. numbered and signed by the artist.

Mamma Andersson Munk, 2017, original lithograph, printed on 300g Velin d’Arches paper, 82,5 x 69 cm. 50 ex. numbered and signed by the artist.

Wangechi Mutu Snake Eater, 2014, original lithograph, printed on 300g Velin d’Arches paper, 69 x 100 cm. 60 ex. numbered and signed by the artist.

Andrea Büttner No Title, 2016, original lithograph, printed on 250g Steinbach paper, 100 x 69 cm. 100 ex. numbered and signed by the artist.

Candida Höfer Conservatoire Royal Bruxelles, 2010, original lithograph / photo lithograph, printed on 250g Velin d’Arches paper, 67 x 74,5 cm. 100 ex. numbered and signed by the artist. 6.

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11. Katharina Grosse No Title, 2007, original lithograph, printed on 300g Velin d’Arches paper, 100 x 70 cm. 19 ex. numbered and signed by the artist.

Rina Banerjee No Title, 2011, original lithograph, printed on 300g Velin d’Arches paper, 100 x 70 cm. 75 ex. numbered and signed by the artist.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Untitled (Rosa), 2016, original lithograph / photo lithograph, printed on 300g Velin d’Arches paper, 68 x 68 cm. 100 ex. numbered and signed by the artist.

Mona Hatoum Untitled (fence, mirrored), 2018, original lithograph, printed on mirri board, 59,5x 47,8 cm. 20 ex. numbered and signed by the artist.

Katharina Sieverding MATON SOLARISATION XI/XII 1969 (Diptych), 2015, original lithograph / photo lithograph, printed on 300g Velin d’Arches paper, 100 x 68 cm (each). 60 ex. numbered and signed by the artist

Chiharu Shiota, No Title, 2015, original lithograph, printed on 300g Velin d’Arches paper, 100 x 67,5 cm. 60 ex. numbered and signed by the artist.

Photos by Lars Gundersen. Courtesy the artist and Edition Copenhagen